Recycling Laptops And IMacs Makes PC Building Fun And Affordable Again

July 19, 2026 by Tyler August 50 Comments

Building a PC used to be a fun adventure — what’s the latest, what’s the greatest, what can I afford? Well, that last question seems to have taken over and sucked all the fun out for a lot of people. [Matt] from [DIY Perks] on YouTube has hit upon a solution that’s brought back the fun, at least for him: recycling! The video is embedded below, and he runs a forum whose thread has more details.

Long story short, though, he’s flagging recycled laptop components as both good value for money and a fun rabbit hole to go down researching parts. The best part, of course, is that you can get a mobo with 32GB of RAM soldered on, and embedded RTX graphics, and a decent processor for about what you’d pay for that RAM on sticks these days. The big hack is getting the dang thing started: he needed to make a single-pin ribbon cable after identifying which pin on the keyboard membrane hit the power button. If you can score a laptop that does not power on from the keyboard, you’ll have an easier time in that regard.

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3D Print This Retro Desktop Case

April 25, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

Once upon a time, not every computer lived in a vertical “tower” case. Many decades back a horizontal arrangement was a popular choice, sometimes just referred to as the “desktop” style. [PuTaTuo] is helping to bring it back, with this amazing 3D printed case design.

The case is designed to suit mini-ITX motherboards, while supporting standard ATX-size power supplies. The printed components are all designed to measure less than 220 mm in any dimension to ensure they can easily be produced on smaller printers. The case has a 3.5″ drive bay cutout up front, which you can use for the front panel I/O or a floppy drive if you’re super-retro like that. The front panel is otherwise relatively simple, with buttons for power and reset as well as power and SSD status LEDs.

Assembly is via M3 hardware and heat set inserts. If you’d like to print your own, you can grab the files from Thingiverse or Printables depending on your taste.

We’ve featured some great 3D printed cases over the years, like this colorful build that focuses on ease of access and servicing. The cool thing about designing your own case is you can optimize it to suit your own desires, and customize it to look as cool as you need it to be.

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3D Printed PC Case Focuses On Ease Of Access

December 26, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 24 Comments

There are all kinds of fun, glowing PC cases on the market these days. However, if you want something that focuses on serviceability over flash while still looking stylish, you might like the Makeyo MK01. It’s a PC case that you can print yourself, and [Marst_art] has published a video on what it’s like to whip one up at home.

The MK01 is assembled from lots of smaller parts, so the components can be made on any 3D printer that has a print area of 210 x 210 mm or more. All the outer panels are affixed to the main chassis with magnets, which makes servicing easy. You can just pop off panels when you need to get inside without undoing any fasteners or clips.

Plus, the cool thing about the MK01 is that since you’re printing it yourself, you can easily make whatever mods you like prior to printing it out. [Marst_art] notes that he threw in a USB-C port to the front panel for easy access, and a few internal mounts for 2.5″ SSDs. He also made some mods to the power switch assembly. It also bears noting—you get to choose your own color scheme when you make one of these. This level of customization is something you simply don’t get when you buy off the shelf!

[Marst_art]’s video is a useful guide if you’re planning to undertake such a build yourself. It outlines what it’s like to actually print one of these things on a consumer printer, and how the settings will influence the final look and feel. It’s worth noting that you’ll probably want to print this in ABS or another filament that can handle high heat, unless you’re building a very cool running machine.

It’s not just a great looking case, it’s a highly functional one, too. Files are available on Printables if you’d like to make your own. We’ve featured other printed cases before, too.

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Dead Amstrad Becomes Something New

June 17, 2025 by Tyler August 7 Comments

When you run into old hardware you cannot restore, what do you do? Toss it? Sell it for parts? If you’re [TME Retro], you hide a high-end mini PC inside an Amstrad-shaped sleeper build.

The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that [TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.

At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.

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PC Case Makes Portable Power Supply

October 21, 2023 by Al Williams 4 Comments

Recently, we’ve seen a lot of semi-portable power stations. These have some big rechargeable battery and various connection options. [Dereksgc] wanted to make his own and decided the perfect housing would be a small PC tower case. (Video, embedded below.) It makes sense. There are plenty of easy-to-work front panel inserts, a power supply box with an AC cord (the power supply is long gone), and it is big enough to fit the battery. You can see the result in the video below.

The bulk of the work was installing power supply modules and a charge controller on floppy disk blank panels. The battery — a 50 Ah LiFePO4 unit — fits nicely in the bottom. Some of the buttons and connectors find use in the new incarnation.

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Enter The Matrix With This Custom PC Side Panel

December 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

With a new Matrix movie out now, it’s hardly a surprise that we’re starting to see more and more projects centered around the franchise’s iconic “Digital Rain” effect. A few particularly unique examples have floated to the top of this virtual tsunami of green-tinted sushi recipes, such as this very slick RGB LED PC side panel built by [Will Donaldson].

In place of the normal clear window in his PC case, [Will] has mounted a black acrylic sheet that has had all of the “code” characters laser-cut from it. Behind that is an array of WS2812B LED strips, nestled into vertically aligned channels that keep the light from bleeding out horizontally. A sheet of frosted plastic is sandwiched between the two, which helps diffuse the light so the individual LEDs aren’t as visible.

All of the LEDs are connected to a NodeMCU ESP8266 by way of a 74AHCT125 level-shifter, though [Will] notes you could certainly use a different microcontroller with some tweaks to the code. As it stands, the user selects from various lighting patterns using two potentiometers and a button that have been mounted next to the panel. But if you were so inclined, it certainly wouldn’t take much to adapt the firmware so that the lighting effects could be triggered from the PC.

The sticklers will note that this means the characters can’t actually change or move, but as you can see in the video below, it still looks quite impressive when the LEDs get going behind them. If you’re looking to recreate the look on a considerably smaller scale, check out this Arduino library that can make it rain on a TFT display with just a few lines of code.

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3D Print An Entire PC Case

June 12, 2021 by Jenny List 33 Comments

With laptops having become a commodity item and single-board computers having conquered the lower end for our community, building a PC for yourself is no longer the rite of passage that it once was; except perhaps if you are a gamer. But there is still plenty of fun to be had in selecting and assembling PC hardware, especially if as [makerunit] did, you design and 3D-print your own case.

This is no motherboard in an old pizza box, but instead a highly compact and well-designed receptacle for a reasonable-performance gaming machine with an ITX motherboard. The chassis holding all the parts sits inside a slide-on textured sleeve, and particular attention has been paid to air flow and cooling. The GPU card is a little limited by the size of the case and there’s no room at all for a conventional hard drive, so a PCIe SSD board takes that role.

We’d hazard the opinion that were this case cranked out by the likes of Apple it would be hailed as some kind of design masterpiece, such is its quality. It certainly shows that there’s so much more to building your own PC than the normal rectangular tower case.

Over the decades we’ve brought you so many PC cases, a recent-ish one that’s worth a look is this Lego Minecraft one for an Intel NUC motherboard.

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