It was mounted on the wall of a local thrift store, and whenever I would walk by, it would whisper "destroy me". After a few weeks, I finally succumbed to the siren's call and, $12 later, I was walking home with a cheap crap clock.

I was hoping to turn the clock into a useful computer. sigh....

The Build

Destroy!

Why don't I have a pre-destruction image of the clock? Damn, I'm slacking.

These are the components of the clock that I wanted.

P.S. Smashing a clock is not the same as killing time.

Amplify

Much like the toaster, a small amplifier was disassembled and new speakers and plug were soldered on. Two power lines were also soldered on. The idea being that I could use 5 volts from the pins on my motherboard to power the amp (more on that later).

Mount the amp

Using a paddle bit, holes were drilled on the sides of the case for the speakers to be mounted over.

Here we have all of amplifier bits mounted in place. In the middle is the little amp.

Mount a Laptop hard-drive

Using some eye-screws, baling wire, and little bits of plastic, a simple system for handing a hard-drive was created.

Mount a crappy Single Board Computer Pt. 1

For mounting the crappy SBC, I used some more eye-screws and zip ties.

"click click click"==done

This is how the top of the SBC was mounted, although in this case 'top' is quite relative.

Mount a crappy Single Board Computer Pt. 2

For the bottom mounting holes, again, eye-screws were used, but instead of zip-ties, a short bit of yarn was used to secure the crappy SBC.

This was my first use of yarn in a custom computer case and it saddens me that it was with such a lousy SBC.

Put that crap on the wall!

All done and on the wall.

Later I added a microphone to the machine so that I could use Blather to control my lights. Unfortunately, the crappy SBC had different ideas.

The Crappy SBC

Quite a while ago, I purchased an Odroid-X, because I read that there was support of Arch Linux. Unfortunately, after I had everything together and Arch was installed, I started running into problems. Audio wasn't working properly, and for a machine that has the main purpose of playing audio and accepting microphone input, this really shit in my oatmeal.

After trying, and failing, to get the machine to boot with any other version of Linux, I gave up on having this machine do what I wanted it to do. sigh

What's in a name?

"pissbox" is now a database backup machine, and I will always do a lot of investigation before purchasing any SBC that isn't designed to run GNU+Linux "out of the box".

There once was a time where I liked to pull my hair out trying to get Linux to install on a computer, but now I just want to install Linux and get cracking on making an odd/interesting/art computer that does what I want it to do.

Now quit reading... and recommend a SBC that I should/could use.