I’ve been steadily volunteering at the Shore Foundation, which refurbishes and recycles computers. One of my new assignments was to create something interesting to put in the lobby out of the raw materials at hand.

There are a lot of raw materials available in the warehouse, as long as you are willing to work with old and broken computer parts.

The first suggestion was to build a motherboard wall–a large permanent installation of old motherboards. This can look cool, but it’s been done before, is very static, and requires many heavy mounting points on the chosen wall. While searching for additional inspiration in the warehouse I found some 7 foot tall sever racks slated for the recycling center. Using these as frames would allow for a more mobile solution and the C-shaped rails would make good mounting points for inward pointing LED strip lights (no point doing this without some blinky blinky).

Filling each rack would require harvesting about 20 motherboards of various sizes and colors. Additionally, interesting heat sinks were added, even if not original, to create some vertical relief and reflective surfaces. The motherboards were installed with standoffs at different levels to vary the relief.

The strip lights can be controlled with a remote to adjust the color. I’m hoping the animated sequences never get used. Two of these monoliths provide some color for the lobby, can be used as room partitions, are potential mounting surfaces sponsor recognition, and can relatively easily be transported to events.