Recently I became interested in 3D printing and bought a Prusa i3 FDM 3D printer. Not long after that, I started designing my first 3D models. Meanwhile I am additionally printing with an Anycubic 3D resin printer which uses the SLA technique. The high resolution compared to the FDM printer is impressive. However, both printer types have their advantages and disadvantages, so depending on the task, I use the FDM or SLA printer accordingly.
Plipbox Deluxe
The Plipbox Deluxe allows any Commodore Amiga to connect via Ethernet to your local network and the Internet. The I/O speed reaches up to 96 kB/s which corresponds to 768 kBit/s, the speed of 12 parallel ISDN lines. Benchmarks have shown, that the maximum achievable transfer speed is CPU bound. That means, that the faster your Amiga CPU is, the faster the transfer speed will be. More detailed benchmarks for the Plipbox Delxue can be found here.
This great piece of retro hardware has been developed by Christian Vogelsang. However, his hardware design was in a prototype state and therefore I decided to pimp it up a little bit. I designed a printed circuit board (PCB) that makes it possible to arrange the hardware components in a flat fashion opposed to the stacked prototype design. Furthermore I positioned the Ethernet port on the backside, so that it will not come into conflict with other peripherals attached to the Amiga computer. Finally I designed my very first 3D model in order to give the hardware some enclosure.
Amiga 3000 Mini
The Amiga 3000 Mini is yet another, but quite special, Raspberry Pi housing. It comes with a built-in PCB that hosts three LEDs indicating power supply, storage and network access. Furthermore a built-in 5V fan and an elaborate air circulation chamber keeps the Raspberry Pi CPU cool. The design of the case is close to the original Commodore Amiga 3000 which hit the market in June 1990.
It took some iterations until the housing fitted perfectly with the Raspberry Pi models 2, 3 and 4. After printing, the cases are sanded and varnished with acrylic lacquer.
