Coffee and PC gaming ground together in perfect harmony, in this fabulous Scandi wood-sauna-themed build
Every Nerdforge project makes me miss my engineering days and this could be the one to make me start all over again.
Like millions of people around the world, I love coffee. In fact, just the thought of writing that made me go and make a mug. I also love computers and gaming, spending many hours engrossed in both of them. If only there were a way to combine all those passions into one handy system. Well, one popular engineering YouTuber has done precisely that and it's the most glorious PC-with-coffee machine you'll ever see.
The YouTuber in question is Nerdforge and I've been following the channel for a long time. For many years, Martina and Hansi have been creating all kinds of mods and DIY projects, sharing their successes and failures across hundreds of videos. Sometimes they're very small and simple, but others are like this—a PC build that also houses a coffee maker, including a bean grinder and drip filter.
Nerdforge never does things by half and when they decided that the most appropriate PC case to house it all in was a Corsair Obsidian 1000D, I knew this was going to be a seriously good project. That's a massive chassis, but the fan mounts kind of get in the way of coffee machines, so cue much hammering and cutting of a $550 PC chassis.
With some judicious 3D printing to get everything nicely mounted, it didn't take long to get the bean grinder and drip filter installed. Nerdforge then turned to a little Arduino kit, some relays, an ultrasound sensor, and a spot of coding to control the whole thing from a single button. Like all good engineering projects, it didn't work the first time but perseverance is a hallmark of Nerdforge videos—though in this case, it was an 'oops, we didn't plug it in' problem more than anything else.
The actual PC build is a fairly typical modern setup, with an Intel Core i7 14700K in an Asus ROG Strix Z790-F motherboard. The graphics card is an MSI GeForce RTX model, but I couldn't tell exactly which one. As for cooling, Nerdforge had to eschew air flow norms—rather than drawing air in from the front of the chassis, a couple of 120 mm fans pull air in at the rear, and along with some more fans and a Noctua NH-U12A CPU cooler, it's all pushed out at the front.
If you're thinking they've got that all the wrong way round, it's like that because of the coffee machine. That generates quite a lot of heat and you don't want it being blown across the PC components, hence the reversed airflow.
The whole build was finished off with the use of wooden sticks (designed for stirring paint!), oiled and glued together. Coupled with some nice LEDs, the whole thing gives off a Scandinavian sauna vibe. The build shown at the end of the video is still a little rough around the edges, but it still looks really cool—albeit somewhat huge, thanks to the 1000D case.
I love custom, weird builds like this and it made me wish I did more of them in my engineering days, rather than just trying to overclock everything to destruction. Nerdforge's blend of creativity, modding skills, and warm positivity (just check out how Martina dealt with losing a finger) is the perfect inspiration for anyone to give projects like this a go.