Pimp my Pi!
When it comes to making a case for your Raspberry Pi, Lego is really the only way to go. I didn’t have the heart to use my daughters’ shiny, girly pink Lego bricks for this, so we dug out my husband’s Lego from the cellar.
Vintage Lego
We worked out that some of this Lego is FIFTY YEARS OLD, inherited from an older cousin! Some of it’s a bit discoloured but on the whole it’s in great condition and felt somehow “right” for styling a Raspberry Pi.
This is what we came up with. The yellow fruit Polo thing is decorative but also structural.
Note the subtle modification to make it WiFi. Saves clogging up another USB port.
It got quite a few retweets on Twitter but there was some disappointing scepticism….
@lizhannaford Erm, I’m not sure that will work.
— (@mk7u) May 11, 2013
Centre for Computing History
So I started thinking about the combination of 50 year old Lego and brand new Raspberry Pi computing technology. What was happening in computing fifty years ago when this Lego was being forged in a Danish furnace?
An internet search brought me to the Centre for Computing History. It will be opening to the public in July 2013 in Cambridge but in the meantime its website is full of useful information such as a Computing History Timeline. Cool!
So let’s choose 1963…
- Douglas Engelbart invents the Mouse
- The first edition of the ASCII Standard was published
- Theodore H (Ted) Nelson coins the phrase Hypertext
I hope you’ll explore those links.
And it’s worth pointing out that you’d have needed far more Lego bricks to encase your computer back then….
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