joungne

HYPERCUBE²

Category

Case Fabrication

Status

Ready for Battle

Deets

visit the complete worklog at : http://users.telenet.be/hypercube/

INSPIRATION

For a first project, designing a case from scratch seemed very hard because I had no specific concept yet, no knowledge whatsoever about the internals of a PC – I had never even touched a soldering iron before July 2004. At this time I started to look for inspiration. It had to be something architectural, modern, and a little futuristic. These were my three keywords to start looking. It didn\‘t take me long to end up at Cube2 : Hypercube.

I\‘ve always been a fan of the movies from Vincenzo Natali, and have his first film, Cube, in my DVD collection. Recently I bought the second part, thinking it was also from this director, but I received something of a shock. It wasn\‘t directed nor written by Natali as the original was, and it doesn\‘t even come close to the first film.

My brainstorming session had brought up the first Cube movie, but I decided very quickly it was going to be to hard to pull it off. Then I remembered the sequel: a brightly lit white cube with a very symmetrical composition, and a design that would be possible to adapt and make a case out of it.

A cube is an excellent example of an architectural element which is in balance. All the sides, corners, angles and areas are the same.

The space that was created in Hypercube (the movie) is for me a perfect example of this balance. Everything is the same; it\‘s perfectly symmetrical in every direction. When watching the movie I always wondered what the outside of this giant cube would look like.

Hypercube² is my interpretation of how the outside could look.

PLANNING, PLANNING, PLANNING...

I started to study the design, the proportions of the different elements and how it was built.
I had to give myself a few standard rules that I had to follow through the whole process to keep it coherent, like the use of color and materials: white, grey, black, and stainless steel, aluminium and plexi.

The basic measurements of the case are based on the measurements of a square micro ATX motherboard. (244mm x 244mm)
The whole PC had to fit in a cube of this size. 244mm + (2×15mm) for the frame = 274mm.
After this descision I started drawing in a CAD program for a month, I made several 3D models to see what it would look like and I even made a cardboard model on scale 1:1 (which I have already thrown out and forgot to take pictures of. How could I know this log was gonna be an article on bit-tech?! wasn\‘t it obvious folks? -Ed).

When I was sure I took everything into account and was satisfied with the design I could start the modding process. It took me another month to get everything I needed (hardware, plexi, stainles steel, dremel and other tools…) Somewhere in July I could start to make my dreamcase come true.

It was very obvious I wanted to make a sort of replica of the Hypercube that would look like the one in the movie, but this would only be possible on the outside of the case because the inside would be packed with hardware. How would I design the inside of this case…

A simple drawing of a Hypercube shows a cube inside a cube. This was the solution for my hardware: I was going to use a \“CORE\” in my design. This core (marked red in the above picture) should house all the important parts of the PC : PSU, dard drives, Rheobus and all wiring. With this in mind and the dimensions of the Micro ATX motherboard I could start drawing…