The Linux Washbox A while ago, the Plus discounter in Germany wanted to release a washer detergent with the name of Linux. They started distributing this washer detergent in the eastern part of Germany where my box also comes from. A little background and history now: the detergent was called Linux because some swiss company (Rösch AG) got the rights for the name Linux and they planed on putting out a whole product range under the name of Linux. Well, seems like it didn't work out 'cause the products never really appeared in the Plus shops. The computer As a Linux addict I thought that I had to get one of those boxes, just because of the name and so I did. Of course the first thing that came to my mind then was: "How can I put a computer in there?". From the dimensions, a "regular" PC would have been too big to fit into the box, so I decided to take an old laptop and take it apart. The Laptop I used for this is a Gericom Intel 300 MHz Celeron with 128 MB of RAM, a S3 Virge Graphics card with 4 MB video RAM, a SOLO-1 sound card, two PCMCIA Type I slots, a floppy and a Toshiba CD-Rom Drive, a 6GB hard drive and all the other regular stuff. Above, you can view the laptop's main board with the COM, LPT and other ports on the top. Sicne the laptop doesn't have a LAN connection on board I used a PCMCIA card and an external connector which can handle both BNC and CAT1 cables. Since I was using a laptop, a pretty neat feature of my washbox is the ability to run it without an external power supply because of the battery inside. Preparing the box I wanted to use all the connectors of the laptop such as LPT, COM etc. with my washbox, so I had to do some pretty cumbersome measuring of the laptop's dimension and apply this to the box. I decided to cut holes into the sides of the box where the connectors should come out of. Inside of the box I decided to sandwhich the computer in between two pieces of wood which also had to have some kind of openings in them because of various connections I had to make to the outside of the box and a big hole for the cooler of the CPU to suck enough air to it. One goal was to keep one side of the box untouched. These two wodden "toasts" where for holding the sandwhich together This is the box from the sides where all the connections will be made to the actual computer. On the very top is a video out, then comes the small USB square, below follows LPT, COM and external monitor connection and on the very bottom the connection for external PS/2 devices. on the inside there is also a pice of wood where the "toasts" are screwed on. This pice of wood is screwed to the very strong cardboard foor (it has to hold 7kg of washer detergent!). This floor is actually 4/5th over the end of the box, so there is room to put stuff in as we will see later. There's also a hole in the bottom pice of wood where I can later access the floppy drive of the laptop as well as one of the PCMCIA slots. The display For the display I first thought I could just use an external monitor, but I soon figured out that it would be cool to have a "carry-on" monitor, so I just used the LCD monitor that came with the laptop. The LCD would be attached to the outside of the box, so that we can always disconnect it, take it off and put it inside of the box for transportation. The LCD is connected to the main board via one big connector from which two different sets of cables lead from. Two cables for the main power of the LCD and another bunch of cables that controll the colors of the display. All these cables have to be made available at the outside of the box, so more holes were needed in the box. Unfortunately the power connection for the LCD is located on the lower left of the LCD and the cables for the color control is at the top-middle of the LCD, so a little bit of stretching the cables was needed... (it still works though...) Inserting the computer Inserting the computer was a bit of a hassle because of the very little space inside the box. I first put one "toast" in and inserted the speakers and the microphone into the box. The next task was to insert the rest of the computer into the box and connecting all the cables that were still hanging around. This was a bit difficult, but in the end it worked out... Network Connecting the network was pretty easy because of the 1/5 space that was underneath the computer and where the box ended. This is where I could connect to the LAN PCMCIA adapter and put another hole in the hull of the box to have a LAN cable to connect to the computer. Power Having a laptop makes power easy. Besides the battery the washbox can run on, there's also an external adapter. I just put this adapter inside of the washbox and drilled another hole into the box where the cable can go into... Happy Penguin Havnig inserted the computer into the box, there came the smoke test... the computer booted! But it booted Win98 since that's what still was on there. But pretty soon I got Linux on there and now the where before was Linux inside (the detergent), now is a PC inside with Linux on it... If you have any questions christoph@geisterstunde.org.

(c) by zeitgeist 14.2.2003