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THE BYTELIGHT

Make a high-tech mood light from a fluorescent lamp and 54 obsolete SIMMs. By Ross Orr

Several years back, I had a volunteer gig with a local charity. My job was to take old Macs that had been donated, and jolt them back to life so they could be resold at our weekly rummage sale.

In those days, the low-end machines often came in with 1 or 2MB of memory — that M is no typo, you youngsters! — and I considered it a great victory if I could scrounge enough memory to upgrade them to 4 or 8MB. (I can also remember fitting System 6 on an 800K floppy — but Grandpa will save that story for bedtime another day.) Anyway, we routinely yanked out 256K SIMMs doing these upgrades, and I eventually accumulated a whole sack of them.

I knew these chips were utterly useless, but could never bring myself to throw them out. I kept dwelling on the thousands of dollars that

their original purchasers had undoubtedly spent on them. Plus, these little wafers were kind of beautiful: each had its own subtly different color, delicate circuit traces, and cryptic labeling. They were almost like jewelry. I felt I needed to do something to honor their now-defunct precious-ness, and thus the ByteLight was born.

The idea is simple, and can be used with any “interesting” piece of circuitry that has outlived its usefulness, as long as a bit of light shines through it. You just need to construct a shallow light box. Fronting it with diffusing plexiglass lets you glue down multiple circuit boards using silicone sealant. You can buy white plexi, but I just used clear scrap I had on hand. Sanding both sides with fine sandpaper on an orbital sander gave it a nicely frosted surface.

Photography by Ross Orr

132 Make: Volume 09