After mixing trance, electro, and progressive for the past year, I’ve finally moved on to the champagne of electronic music: Tech House. I now find that I have the brain power to mix four decks and use four fx decks. After forgetting my laptop across the state, I used my big tower rig with a 1080p monitor to play with the s4 a little. Instant addiction to the screen real estate.
Came across a little money after selling a part of off my open wheel race car and decided it was time to upgrade from my pos 13" windows laptop. I decided I wanted to run osx due to the random issues I had with my windows rig… I was soon to find that to get a 1080p or higher Macbook I had to get a current generation 17" pro…
Came to find that most of these current gens 17’s are at least $1600 used… F that shit… I decided I’d rather build something odd… I needed to brush up on my solidworks anyways.
Decided to build some kind of a hybrid between an s4, hackintosh, flight case, and big ass 22" led monitor. The chassis will be made of 3x3in t6061 aluminum angle and flat stock welded together. I ordered a bunch of brackets, hardware, and corner covers from fastenal… including a nice locking hinge for the monitor. Also managed to find a bunch of electronics bulkhead fittings to replicate the back of the s4 on the outside of the chassis.
I decided to control the computer with a magic touchpad/keyboard connected by a “magic wand”. I have some nylon round stock that I’ll notch to allow the assembly to slide in and out of the front of the chassis.
…Alright that was a little long… the actual point of this post is to crowd source some ideas before I actually weld the thing together and finish it up in the next few weeks. You can see in the last photo I had another iteration in which the chassis included my kontrol x1… I decided it would be better to ax that idea and just use a smaller psu to keep the footprint down. In this final form the monitor will actually fit inside the footprint when folded down.
Not a bad suggestion, and something I had considered. However I decided to go with my hackintosh route as I could build a faster computer for $400 less than a mac mini.. plus I would have usb 3.0 support in osx. Usb3 is important to me as I transfer my files between comps this way… saves me a lot of time. Plus I assume future NI gear is going to be usb3 to cut down on latency. I do plan on throwing two 92mm’s in the back… something not shown in the model.
Thx for the input!
edit: might not be totally obvious in my model, but the blue thing is the entire assembly running osx, you can see I actually got osx installed on my windows hardware in the picture with my led display in my laundry basket (for some reason).
Well apple seems to go a different route don’t know if thunderbolt is compatible with usb 3. So i think native is waiting this one out.
some info from the net.
Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0 vs eSATA: Availability
Right now, only one firm makes Thunderbolt-enabled computers - Apple - and Thunderbolt-enabled peripherals such as hard disks are just starting to be announced. USB 3.0 devices - largely, but not exclusively, hard disks - are already available, and there are plenty of eSATA hard disks out there too.
Thunderbolt is largely an Intel technology and Intel clearly favours it over USB 3.0, so we’d expect Thunderbolt’s profile to change quickly as Intel chucks its considerable weight behind the technology.
LaCie and Western Digital are already on board, and as Thunderbolt is fairly simple to engineer - if firms are already making PCIe or DisplayPort devices, it’s relatively easy to make them into Thunderbolt devices - we’d expect to see lots of firms follow suit.
Is that bad news for USB 3.0? Not necessarily. The ubiquity of USB 2.0 means there are lots of USB devices out there, and USB 3.0 is turning up in everything from laptops to tablets.
There are already stacks of USB 3.0 devices on sale, and the presence of LaCie and Western Digital in the USB 3.0 market as well as the Thunderbolt one suggests we’re looking at USB and FireWire all over again, with consumer devices going for USB and pro kit using the faster, less common standard.
And eSATA? Its advantages over USB 2.0 are obvious, but even if it matched internal SATA’s move to 6Gbps speeds it’d still be significantly slower than Thunderbolt and only slightly speedier than USB 3.0. It’s starting to look like a technology whose time is almost up.
Anyhow seems like a fun project and, hope you keep us up to date with some pictures.
Thanks souldancer, I will for sure keep you guys updated.
I totally agree with you on the firewire vs usb all over again sentiment… however If I move away from traktor it will be to cdj’s… so I think I’ll be within NI’s realm for quite some time. Looking at NI’s product lineup i don’t see many if any firewire devices, so I feel like they’ll probably default to usb3. Just a gut feeling of course… the real reason for my usb3 affinity is the fact that I already have some usb3 devices
Do you guys have any ideas on what I should do with my x1? I was thinking that I could use some kind of quick releases on it to attach it (deck level) on the left or right of the enclosure… carrying it separately in a bag with my headphones and cables…
I feel like there’s a much more clever solution to integrating my x1 with all of this but I just can’t come up with it.
I think thunderbolt is awesome… would be a bit hard to transfer data faster than the speed of light. But like all format/standard wars, the better of the two seems to always lose…
Anyways I’m getting off track… and I’ve still got no idea what to do with my x1
An exploded image to try and help explain how I plan on constructing this
Maybe, if you got space left underneath the s4, you good make a drawer that you pull out for the x1. Only need to think about something that put the x1 in the same height. Or make a mechanism in the drawer like a mini crane stand or something that will lift the x1 in a higher position and a bit tilted. If i make any sense?
And you might wanna think about if you really want your screen in front of you or have at least an option to put it aside of you.
I like the drawer idea, unfortunately there isn’t enough space down there. I think I’ve decided to just get an x1 case… it brings it pretty close to the correct level.
I was having second thoughts about the monitor position the other day… as of now I have really hacked it up to get it to attach to the hinge. Going to have to put a bit of thought into that.
The aluminum was handed off to my machinist buddy (we cant use the mills at my school for personal projects). After he is done with it I’ll have a few pieces welded an a local performance auto shop (I don’t want to buy a spool gun for my mig welder… usually required for doing aluminum). After that it will be assembled… I’ll put some pics up, play with it for a while, and then disassemble and have it anodized black.
Finished it just in time to play my first show. Some how got the 115 timeslot so the club was absolutely packed. Was extremely nervous… thought that I would either trainwreck or my little creation would start on fire, or at the very least shut off randomly. The stage in front of the booth was also completely packed, I had someone fall into the table that my s4 frankenstein job (which has been since named the “Monster Masher”)… thank god I have an ssd or the show could have stopped right there.
i have a question. do you have a protecting cover that sits between the screen and over the cover when its packed away for transportation? I could see this as the week point?
