My 12yo is into retro gaming and has recently become obsessed with Portal. He decided he wanted to make a weighted companion cube PC case. We had a (very) old Mac Mini in a drawer that I’ve had since before he was born so we got it out and installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Next, he used his remarkably good vector drawing skills to make a design for the box and his 3D design skills to make the corners and edge pieces. We laser cut the box out of hardboard and glued it together (leaving the top unglued).
Next, we 3D printed all the corner and edge pieces. This took a long time.
We spray painted the inner box a darker gray and then glued all the 3D printed parts on (only glueing the top parts to the top of the box so we could remove the ‘lid’).
Next we 3D printed the heart shapes for the circular cutouts and also laser cut hearts out of plexi to fit into the openings.
These all got glued in and then we got to work actually putting the computer in the box, running cables, and adding some USB powered RGB LEDs to light it from the inside.
The finished product (with some action shots of Portal play on the screen).
