Pyramid by Henk Hamers

External Design and Cooling

The polystyrene plates deform easily, and we had to experiment to find the right combination for the glue. We used at least 10 types of glue before finding the right mixture. We sprayed the resulting plate covers with black and copper paint, and shoe polish to make it look worn. The end result was better than we'd imagined.

Powering up the PC for the first time ended in disaster. As the pyramid is a closed system with no ventilation holes besides those in the bottom and lower sides (the base is elevated off the ground), it became very hot inside, and the CPU reached temperatures well above 70ºC.

To fix this, I added a few fans to blow hot air out through the bottom of the pyramid. By using a fan controller and low-speed fans the noise is negligible. Temperatures are down to 40ºC when idle and 50ºC under load, which is acceptable - the components I used can easily withstand these temperatures, as they're usually cramped up inside a laptop.







For the 5in screen to be more than just decoration, I wrote a flash application that displays symbols from Stargate along with information from the motherboard, such as temperatures and CPU activity.





As the Pyramid is designed to be a media PC, everything had to be controlled from the remote control, which meant had to design an additional PCB to control the lights and the moving side of the pyramid. This means the pyramid is stuffed with various PCBs.