Commodore 64--2021

thingiverse

This is easily the biggest project I've ever attempted in the world of 3d printing. It wouldn't be worth the trouble except that, as a fresh-faced young college grad all ready to save the world, I had the original Commodore 64--for a few months, until it was stolen. By the time I could afford another they just weren't available anymore, and much more powerful computers cost much less. Then along came 3d printers, and Thingiverse, and https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3474432 was published. So "pcmarket" gave me almost 3 months' worth of troubles! Some of them are detailed in my general writeup here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/k12b9dcaru3djno/C64writeup.pdf/file And I'll try to add the appropriate details for printing here, and I've uploaded the .stl files I used. I can no longer find the owners of "reparaturplatte.stl" and "Fan_Guard_v1.stl", sorry; if anyone will enlighten me here, I'll give proper credit. The LED bezel is mine, the "C64Badge.stl" is here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4218692/files, I just combined his "back" and "silver" files; and since I clearly couldn't duplicate the color stripes, I stole the rainbow flag from the gay rights movement, lopped off the purple (bottom) one in GIMP and added the black ones. I found I couldn't get my local Walgreens automated photo printing to downsize it until I pasted the tiny flag onto a 4x6" background; it cost US$0.35 to print it. How to print a monstrosity like this? "pcmarket" posted the case in smaller parts but I didn't want to look at the seams down the middle, so I used the complete model. This was a challenge but I managed to do it all in Slic3r-Prusa. Of course it still requires a huge printer; I have an Anycubic Chiron, which after a few trials and tribulations finally got the job done. I did scale the models down to 95% so they'd fit comfortably on the 400mm bed. Fortunately the full model's keys were seen by Slic3r-Prusa as separate parts, so I could split the model into parts and delete all but the case itself. It would have made my life easier if the keyboard tray had been a separate part also but no such luck. I then cut the model in half the long way, at 32mm IIRC; yes I know that still leaves a seam, but it's nearly invisible, and I needed to put a lot of stuff inside after installing both keyboards (I wanted a number pad as well as a standard keyboard). At print time I discovered that Slic3r still saw the model as solid, so wouldn't generate support material; I had to print the top at 10% infill, which made it much more difficult to remove. I finally got rid of as much of the infill as necessary, using a Dremel, files, pliers and saws. The top I printed at .1mm layer height, as the area around the keyboard looked more like a staircase at .2mm. The bottom was much easier, I just printed it with 0 infill and 0 top layers, 2mm layers and 6 wall layers. This left the bottom of the keyboard tray hanging in midair; I just let the printer spray filament in the air and cleaned it out later. One day maybe I'll learn how to do it right. The "C64Badge" is already scaled to 95%, just print it black then (as soon as you see letters) change to silver. The LED bezel is also scaled, I printed several in just a few minutes and picked the best one. You'll need two of the "reparaturplatte" (repair plate), I found that the fan guard didn't hold the back of the case from sliding around as well as I'd hoped so I added them. So now that I have this gorgeous case, how do I make a computer out of it? First, of course, cut out the top to fit the keyboards and glue them in with clear Epoxy. See the second pic of the insides? THIS IS HOW NOT TO DO IT. That's a Raspberry Pi in there, of course, and it turns out it's very sensitive to radio frequency interference. That white cube power supply has adequate rating for the Pi but it can't be that close to it on bootup; you won't have either wi-fi or bluetooth. Nor can you have that USB hub near the SSD, in fact you can't have any active wires near the SSD's adapter chip, not even the wires for the LEDs. I suspect if I ever try to boot it with the analog out port enabled I'll have to move it too, that's the one wire that's still next to the SSD in the other layout pic. The Pi board itself is mounted on standoffs, and there is a hole in the bottom both for ventilation and uSD card access. It boots from the SSD but I've found that access to be a lifesaver on several of my Pi projects, including this one. The LEDs are just eye-candy but I think they give a look of professionalism and completion. Not only were they inspired by https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4106551 but I used his wiring diagrams and scripts, with his permission of course. Nicolas was quite helpful for this project as well as when I bought his construction kit for the Amiga Mini. For this one I just soldered the resistors to the LEDs and then to some F-F DuPont wires to go to the Pi's GPIO pins. Put it together--then split the case again to re-route those wires, they were too close to the SSD so I booted up without wi-fi or bluetooth again! Finally got it right, even if it's nearly forty years late.