Acorn Archimedes A3010 IDE Back Panel

Continuing on from my previous A3010 Acorn Archimedes article I've now got the machine working and wanted to design and 3D print a custom back panel for my IDE Compact Flash drives.

I picked up a cheap dual Compact Flash card to IDE convertor from ebay. My A3010 has a Castle IDE interface and the idea of getting rid of the noisy old 2.5" 240MB hard drive was too tempting. One of the limitations of the Operating System on the A3010 (RISC OS 3.1) is the maximum harddrive supported is about 500MB so this dual Compact Flash drive is a great idea allowing me to have 2 harddrives. 1 permanent harddrive and one that can be swapped out for another without undoing any screws!

I needed something to attach the CF adapter to and slide into the blank panel on the back of the A3010 which would expose one of the CF cards allowing me to swap them as I need.

So using 123D Design I knocked up this simple design that's fairly easy to print with minimal use of supports. Using the CF adapter I measured the position of the 4 holes to ensure it all lined up correctly at the end.

With the design done it's time to print it out, in the end I opted for Gold plastic. I could never get the printed colour to match the colour of the A3010's faded/yellowed case so why not go for something that stands out!

Now I have a perfectly silent A3010 Archimedes whilst having the benefit of mass storage provided by the CF cards. Whilst not massive (500MB each) that storage space goes a long way in the land of Acorn computers!

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About the author:Dan Birch is a 3D design and printing experimentalist. I'm also an experienced Web developer, games developer, retro gaming enthusiast and occasional hardware hacker.