Here’s a photo of one of the projects we’re working on. It’s about 3/4 complete:

Crash Cart : Standing Up

It’s a “crash cart” for the garage. In a medical environment it’s a cart that has all the stuff you need if someone is dying. In IT it has a similar meaning: It’s a monitor/keyboard and sometimes PC that you can roll around a data center to hook up to a “dying” server.

In our case, it will be a rolling stand for a garage-based PC. We need a PC in the garage for debugging some stuff (running logic analyzers, programming microcontrollers, etc).

The bottom has a shelf-area for the PC (it’s hard to see now that it’s painted black):

Crash Cart : Base

The shelf at the mid-point you see will be for the keyboard and the mouse. Above that, not yet installed, will be two side-by-side LCD monitors.

The unit is about 5 1/2 feet tall and made out of good-old 2×4′s screwed together. The upright is two of them, and the base are four in a star-like pattern, with an additional 1×4 screwed to the bottom for the casters to ride on. It won’t hold a ton of weight, but it will handle a couple of big PCs without a problem.

A side note on castors: Get big ones. They make things a LOT easier to roll around. We got these 4″ models from Harbor Freight for about $3 each (four needed).

I’ll post some more photos as we install the monitors and the PC.