I purchased a broken Apple iMac from 2006. I then purchased a replacement screen, removed the non-functional electronics, and installed a Raspberry Pi 4. After installing the ‘iRaspbian’ OS, which resembles typical Apple OS, the PiMac was born.
This project involved the following skills;
- Electronic Hardware
- Raspberry Pi
- Linux Software
The PiMac – Upgraded
I installed a cheap USB LED to simulate the typical Apple logo illumination. As Raspberry Pi computers do not have speakers, I added a speaker module to add sound. I then 3D printed a case to improve the sound. In terms of performance upgrades, I overclocked the Raspberry Pi and then 3D printed a case and installed a fan to aid with thermal throttling. Finally I changed the bootloader on the Raspberry Pi to boot from an external SSD drive. All of which, greatly improved performance. The PiMac is now my go-to computer for all my electronic hobbyist work.
This project involved the following skills;
- Electronic Hardware
- Raspberry Pi
- 3D Printing
- CAD Design
- Configuration of Bootloader
- Benchmarking
- Testing
Internal Speaker
Sound is a bit muffled but more than good enough for my use case, which will be mostly following YouTube ‘how to’ videos.
The amplifier speaker module is from Monk Makes and cost around £18 so it’s fairly expensive but saved me a bunch of time. It connects to the raspberry pi 5v & ground on the GPIO pins. And final connection is audio jack on board to audio jack on the Pi. Mounted the whole thing onto the iMac housing next to the Pi.
I 3d printed a case for the speaker to increase the volume.
