The Ruiz Brothers' Little Connection Machine Puts an Eye-Catching '80s Supercomputer on Your Desk

Brothers Noe and Pedro Ruiz have put together a guide to building your own Connection Machine — an eye-catching supercomputer from decades past — out of a 3D-printed chassis and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

"The Connection Machine was a groundbreaking massively parallel supercomputer of the mid-1980s and 90s," the brothers Ruiz explain. "Just as incredible as the machine’s performance was its industrial design: An ominous black cube-of-cubes, with system activity conveyed through thousands of red LEDs. It looks straight out of sci-fi… but it’s real!"

Real Connection Machines are thin on the ground today, which inspired the creation of the Little Connection Machine — a 3D-printed replica, complete with eye-catching light display, suitable for hosting a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. Alternatively, if its only use is for decoration, the light show can be driven by a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board.

"The case features an open design with lots of room to mount fans, sensors or even a speaker. Vents on the top, back and bottom help keep components cool," the brothers Ruiz explain. "The case is assembled with screws and press-fit parts that make it easy to customize. One could fit a USB battery bank to make a portable CM-1. Or, keeping on-theme with parallel processing, ambitious folks could probably fit a whole mini Linux cluster inside there using several Raspberry Pis!"

The display panels, meanwhile, are made from eight 9×16 LED matrices — making a total of 1,152 LEDs. The default mode lights and extinguishes the LEDs at random, while two other modes are provided for Raspberry Pi 4 installations: A "chaser" animation, inspired by the later-model Connection Machine 5 seen in Jurassic Park; and an audio visualizer, which uses a USB microphone as its input.

The 3D print files, parts list, source code, and full assembly instructions are available on the Adafruit Learn portal now.