Building a bar out of a 42U Rack

September 2018, two good friends are in my living room and we are discussing what weird project that would be interesting to undertake for ANDERSTORPSFESTIVALEN 4. We discussed a lot of ideas but one thing that stood out was highlighting the romance to the old internet. Back then every part about computers seemed impossible, modems and browsers was such a futuristic experience and the general gist at that time was that this technology would pave the way for a new form of communication. It eventually did, but lost behind was this excitement over technology. Today technology is almost transparent, people think about the applications rather than the technology and lost is the art of tuning a modem to achieve higher speeds over a phone wire.

What if we could capture some of our feelings from this time and create something to homage this era. This idea grew on us until we during a brief visit to one of the large tech companies saw a 42U rack laying on it’s side, remade into a bar. It was a rudimentary design and probably more thought of as a joke but it resonated with our group. We talked about it for the rest of the evening and ended up drawing a rudimentary design on paper.

You probably can’t make anything out of this, but we essentially envisioned this rack resting on the back part instead of the side with one of the sides being cut out with a large piece of plexiglass. Inside would be filled with technology, alcohol and cabling supporting the idea. We distilled it down to being a hybrid physical bar with the innards being the actual inventory display. In the rack we would mount 2 x Cisco 2960 powering the festival network, a monitor for statistics and 2 x 56k modem in order to uplink data for this monitor (more about this later). The inventory display would be a tilted plane with fake ice that has color backlighting in order to create this diffuse light effect that would shine through and illuminate the bottles from behind. The back of the inside of the rack would be large UV painting done by Johanna supplemented by internal UV LED lighting in order to make the patterns stand out.

The problem with deciding on ideas like this is that everyone has their own variation of this concept in their head. During this project I started to understand why gaming companies have concept artists on payroll, as they are the people setting the actual tone and feeling of a visual design before artists implement this into the medium itself. Since this was starting to become and issue for us and discussions started looping around, I drew up a model in Cinema 4D and rendered out some concepts that we iterated on together until everyone was onboard with the concept

This rendering is from the front and clearly shows most of the elements described above, the UV painting, fake ice, vertically mounted switches and 56k modems mounted on the switches.

So how does one go from these renderings into an actual physical build? The first part is to actually get hold of a 42U rack. Said and done, Alexander and Viktor manages to scrape up a rack that’s about to be thrown out of a server hall in Stockholm and drive this bad boy all the way down to Anderstorp in order to be stored until the build begins.

A couple of months later, the build of Anderstorpsfestivalen 4 starts and we load this massive slug onto a trailer in order to bring it to the festival site. Remember that this thing weighs over 130 kilos so it is less of a fun experience carrying this around. It’s also not often you see a 42U rack loaded up with 20 cases of beer on a trailer.

Since we basically have to rebuild the rack from inside out in order to fit our specifications, we start with tearing down all the innards and throwing away all the pieces that won’t be needed for this project. 42U racks are designed to hold load while standing up, not laying down. This means that a lot of retrofitting has to be done in order to make sure that the structural integrity is still solid when 8 drunk people are leaning on this beast.

The next step is to mask all of the glass out in order to paint the outer and inner enclosure black. We decided early on that the 90s grey that the rack came in was a bit too much for us to handle in terms of surrounding design so covering this up was the first priority.

While me, Alexander and Viktor was working on the hardware side of the rack, Johanna started paining the pieces that would fit inside of this rack and be illuminated by UV LEDs. Initially Johanna had sketched up these “la croix” style patterns that would invoke feelings of bad 90s design but still be visually pleasing

Once we got the plywood, Johanna ended up forgoing this design and focusing on filling in the natural wood instead. The plywood piece that we bought had these beautiful natural wood lines that could be traced with the neon colors to create a beautiful pattern.

Since the drink inventory would be slanted, there would be room underneath to stash all technology to drive the Raspberry Pi’s and LEDs in order to power the dashboard, modems and landline phone project. The LEDs underneath the acrylic ice is a strip of APA102 powered by a Pixelblaze in order to facilitate easy animations. In the end we settled for slow moving color shifts between colors that worked with the neon colors.

Sadly we underestimated the amount of fake ice that would be needed to cover an area like this so we had to settle on centering the drink inventory. Due to this miscalculation of acrylic ice, there was room to add more UV paintings on the slanted area in order to fill out the visual negative that currently existed.

As I talked about last year, it’s really something to have these projects materialize in a physical form after thinking about them for so long. This particular project took a lot of slow burning thinking and group visualizing over voice chat which made it so complex to pull off. The end result, albeit not enough ice, was better than what I had imagined that we could pull off.

Kåsböle

North of Umeå there is a small village by the name of “Kåsböle”.

In order to get some peace and quiet after ANDERSTORPSFESTIVALEN I embarked on a long drive up there in order to meet an old friend. This is a friend that I wish that I could meet more often but due to distance and non-adjacent friend networks seldom do. The few days spent up there was a Swedish dream, everything was as of out of a tourist guide. Light all night, fantastic nature and a peace and calm that differs greatly from the stressed environment of San Francisco. Time feels less important when the surroundings move at a slower pace.

Dazed & Blazed (Pixelcube Part 5)

Been a while since I wrote an update about this project. Lot has happened in life which is why this post has been postponed a bit. Traveled a lot for work and managed to catch the flu on one of these trips which had me spending a lot of time at home, playing RDR2.

Last post talked a bit about drilling but at that time I still hadn’t figured out how to fit all the electronics within the cube. One of the design goals is to have no visible wires except for the power/signal feed coming in at one of the sides. This means that all the power distribution has to happen inside the cube. Since the space and the AWG cable requirement is so high it was impossible to just do this the simple way. Everything has to fit in that tiny 3 way connector which meant that most of the connectors had to be perfectly flush with the 3D printed ends.

The blue outlined part representes the acrylic tube, meaning the inner diameter is about 31,5mm. Within this diameter, the aluminium profile, passthrough data cable, power cable and LED strip has to fit with junctions and soldering + the MOLEX connector that connects with the other tubes. In order to get this right i tapped the knowledge of 2 good friends who happened to be in San Francisco, Love and Pajlada once again spent a day with me to bounce ideas on how to build this.

What we ended up deciding on was that the power rail cable would be crimped separately in the MOLEX connector, then there would be a soldered junction in parallel with the power rail that branched out to the LED strip from both directions in order to ensure that there would not be a voltage drop which causes less intensity. The signal passthrough would be fixated using hot glue to the aluminium angle.

Next up, the diffusion film that goes inside of the tubes had to be inserted. Since the diameter is 31,5mm and this film isn’t made to be rolled it was quite a challenge to insert this film without damaging it and creating crevasses in the film. What ended up working is using a round wooden stick on which the film was first rolled up onto, pushed into an acrylic tube and expanding onto it’s shape inside the acrylic tube. Since I once again went too far with my perfectionism I wanted the seem to be invisible, this however meant that the cut between the 2 rolls of film had to align perfectly, so cutting this had to be very exact. Luckily I had just the solution for this.

It turns out you can use one of these plastic mats from IKEA designed for office chairs to not damage the floor as a cutting board, couple this with some 3D printed measurement brackets and a laser cut acrylic template, it was easy to cut these up and fit them into the tubes. You can see the nice effect that becomes when the diffusion is inside of the tubes rather than outside, as the acrylic tube creates a certain glossy depth.

Lots of time was spent soldering these together and fixating the LED strip onto the structural bracket. The neat thing about the bracket is that it reflects a lot of the light so the result is a very even light distribution. This picture also shows the passthrough and the exiting power cables from the rail in more clearly, this allowed the result to be very flush.

Finishing these up felt like a real milestone in this project. The only hardware part remaining now is the connector cables for the ends, which can be made very fast. From now on I need to focus more on getting the software up and running as that has been a bit on backburner due to me focusing on some other projects related to ANDERSTORPSFESTIVALEN.

My hope is to write 2 more updates about this cube in rapid succession, one about how the code has developed and one about the actual launch of this in July, see you then!

OZORA USA

The good part about Psytrance gatherings is that they are usually located in remote areas. Unlike a big festival that focuses on ease of reach, simple transport options and surrounding services, the psytrance gatherings are often the opposite. Such was the case with Ozora USA, a small “sample” of the European experience (which was a instant go for me). The location was hidden away all the way up in the desert mountains with this beautiful view, about an hour drive from the nearest town.

Smaller festival tends to create smaller and more intimate communities, which is why they are more enjoyable. With music running 24/7 from the stage the concept of “getting drunk for the night” doesn’t exist. You can go and sleep for a couple of hours and get right back to the stage which makes it more a marathon and less of a sprint. This creates another kind of mood of the audience, being in it for the long haul together.

If you’ve never tried it, there is something special about standing with strangers and watching the sunrise come up over the horizon while hearing the echoes of the stage behind you.

The trip was worth every minute, driving through these landscapes was almost as much of a highlight as the event itself. With that said, 4 days of Psytrance is sort of the limit of what i can handle so it feels good to be home.

Citrus

Geojazzin (Bike Touring Part 1)

Have you ever heard of geocaching? My bet is you have and it is as stupid as you might imagine, you’re really just searching for plastic boxes in inconvenient locations. I happened to enjoy traversing the city at night, skipping sleep with my friend Johan Andersson in 2009. The first reason was the joy of finding these plastic boxes but the second was the feeling of freedom that came with travelling outside your zone of comfort at 3AM in winter of Borås. I lived for these nightly journeys, to the point where missing school was a recurring consequence of chasing the plastic boxes.

When one is 19 years old, becoming a “pro geocacher” sounds like a terrific idea (less so now) and any way me and Johan could do more of it was worth the time and excuses it took to get there. Many times we just drove out to a random place and started searching for caches on my rather fresh iPhone (yeah, the first useless one) using what by today’s standards would be unuseable network speeds and find caches. I miss the excitement around this, simple tasks that really gave us the joy of exploring.

The First Trip

Towards the summer of 2009, we had the brilliant idea of “why not combine a longer bike trip with tons of geocaching” as we at that point had found most of the fun caches available around Borås. Johan and a person named John Kumlin had done a shorter trip in 2008 so they had some prior experience on doing trips like these. The goal was to bike over 1000 km and find over a 100 geocaches. The route would pass over Gothenburg, up to Strömstad over the archipelago, quickly peek into Norway, pass through Karlstad and Kristinehamn, pop down to Hjo and Skövde and take us over Läckö Slott back to Borås. I couldn’t find the GPX file but this is the map as I remember it.

We left the town on the 10th of July, setting our destination towards Gothenburg. With our true luck, the first day started with rain, as did basically every other day except 1. In true Swedish summer fashion, we had rain the majority of the time on this trip which turned out to be a challenge when trying to find over a 100 geocaches in 10 days. At one point I assumed that there couldn’t be more water in my shoes, which led me to step into a river to find a cache. I quickly realized that there can in fact always be more water in your shoes.

The miserable first day ended in that we put up our tents next to the sea, just outside of Stenungsund. After enduring a long night of rain in a deep sleep from the exhaustion of the first day, I awoke to a strange sensation of feeling like I slept in a pool. I was floating. It turns out that my tent did a great job at letting water in, but not letting water out, creating a pool where all of my belongings were underwater. I shouted to Johan and Joakim who had come to the same conclusion, both scared of moving as that meant actually making the sleeping bag wet. Eventually Joakim proclaims that the ship is sinking and leaves the tent.

A miserable morning that never seemed to end eventually had us rolling for one of the longest days of biking. We throw away our tents, they are obviously useless, banking on the fact that we have a bed for the night at our destination. I sadly don’t have many pictures from this day but believe me when I say that it was truly miserable. We eventually arrived at the coastal town of Grebbestad which is a small vacation town in which we finally meet John, joining us a bit later on the trip due to another commitment.

With the full gang together the spirits are lifted and it the dread of biking throughout the night in rain are lifted with some sun. John insists that we take a picture of his signature move “the freeze” before leaving Grebbestad. From here the really stupid geocaching starts.

The night goes on and we find a variety of different geocaches along the coast all the way up to Strömstad. One particularly memorable one was a “MEGA” that ended up being a small house full of stuff, acting as a weird geocache that the owner had created. As the sun starts setting we realize that we forgot to actually purchase any tents in Grebbestad, having thrown away our previous tents we are not left with many options rather than to come up with creative solutions. Sweden has this nifty law called Allemansrätten which essentially allows anyone to spend the night at one’s land if you are not disturbing the owner of the land. After reminding yourself of this, we come across a cottage just meters before the Norweigan border in the middle of nowhere. I think it’s first after waking up that we realized the absolute state that this cottage was in.

After discussing this over breakfast by the road we challenge ourselves to keep this spirit of sleeping up. Why buy a tent where these locations conveniently appear out of nowhere? This trip and the subsequent one ended up being mostly about this concept, trying to find what we titled a “Pundarskjul” due to the thrill that came with exploring these abandoned houses. We also started abusing the fact that Sweden has “industrisemester”, basically a block where most people take vacation in July, leaving a lot of the industrial buildings empty and serving as perfect spots to camp under.

We ended up becoming so accustomed to this that by the end of the trip we just slept in anything that had a roof. This particular place is Värsås IP, a small soccer field between Hjo and Skövde which served as a great location to camp. We woke up to the sound of a lawnmower, with the person cutting the grass just ignoring the fact that we existed which even further bolded our intent on continuing this practice.

Cachingwise? We took tons of innovative caches this trip. It’s hard to remember them all but one in particular stood out, the cache named “Fångarna på fortet”. An old military fort in Sweden built before WW2 that was about to get shut down had a multi-cache which required you to break into the fort and solve physical puzzles inside the fort in order to get the hint for the next part of the cache. It was truly a joy and the person who worked on this had taken extra care to make the puzzles a homage to the game show “Fort Boyard”.

Apart from that you had the usual micro’s (a small cache people hide in boring places), railroad caches, bridge caches, road sign caches etc. Just about the variety of caches you can find in a country that has a lot of snow for 1/3rd of the year. We even met a maintainer of a cache in Skövde who was about as weird you can expect from someone that had over 300 active caches.

The parts that really stick with you 10 years later are the small things that you didn’t realize back then, random strangers offering free drinks out of the trunk of a Volvo 740 or preparing to bike the last 60km just as the sun was setting. It was these moments that made the trip worth it, even if the cold rain and sleep deprivation often plagued us.

Sadly this trip came to an abrupt ending. During the last day of biking I crashed into a road sign just by lack of attention. There were tons of reasons that attributed to this but it cut my trip short as my bike sadly broke from the experience. I was luckily not hurt (I had even lost my helmet at this point so in hindsight I’m glad nothing happened) and had to cut the trip short. The good part about this is that it left me hungry for more.

We did another major one the year after this and I kept doing trips like these for many years afterwards with Sara. I’ll talk more about the next one in Part 2.