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Chattanooga: Computer club creates working computer in an aquarium

By: Clint Cooper
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Brian Phillippi

The submerged sign amid decorative beads in the five-gallon aquarium says “No Dumping.”

But it’s too late.

Near the sign are a computer mother-board and power supply, out of which snake cords and tubes that connect to the machine’s floppy, CD and hard drives, keyboard and monitor.

Someone hasn’t accidentally elbowed part of a computer into the fish tank, though.

Instead, Liquid PC, a project of the HEROES Club at Chattanooga State Technical Community College, is a complete operating system whose “engine” lies within five gallons of mineral oil.

“I thought if they can build one in a fish tank, they can build one anywhere,” said Brian Phillippi, associate instructor in the computer operations technology sector of the school’s Tennessee Technology Center. “They carried it further than I thought they would.”

A YouTube video inspired the project.

Computer operations technology class student Jeff Thompson, 21, of Cleveland, had heard of similar projects and found one on the video-sharing Web site.

“I had been curious about it,” he said. “I wondered (if) it helped the temperature and how it affected the performance.”

Other class members like the idea and thought the club could do it. Class member Seth Bledsoe, who was absent, was picked to head up the project.

“They decided I would be in charge,” he said. “I said, ‘What? You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

However, he said the assignment didn’t shock or bother him. In fact, it intrigued him.

“I knew I could do it,” said Mr. Bledsoe, 21, a Soddy-Daisy resident. “I wondered what improvements I could make. That’s the way I deal with a lot of stuff.”

Mr. Phillippi supplied parts from an old computer, including a 1998 power supply. The tank and the mineral oil were donated. The final project has supplies and parts worth $250 to $300, he said.

“I knew it could work,” said Mr. Bledsoe. “I salvaged what I could.”

The power supply and mother board, with CPU and memory, could be submerged because the liquid is nonconductive and won’t burn. Vegetable oil could have been used, too, but the mineral oil looked more like water.

That left the external add-ons.

Mr. Bledsoe’s original design had the floppy, CD and hard drives stacked on top of the aquarium lid, but Mr. Phillippi suggested he revise that.

In order to do that, he drew out a plan in which the drives were mounted against a metal plate connected to the aquarium’s rear wall. He designed another metal plate to go across the top of the aquarium to make the soundboard cards more sturdy.

A suggestion by Mr. Bledsoe’s uncle led the student to add a radiator of sorts to the unit. What he used was a transmission cooler normally found on a Chevrolet S10 pickup truck or Jeep Cherokee.

To help cool the computer, a fish tank pump circulates the water to the external radiator through clear tubes.

Because of the power supply fan and the cooling device, the temperature of the unit is usually around 88 degrees, Mr. Bledsoe said. With six hours of use, it only rises to around 105 degrees. A normal computer is around 120 degrees, he said.

Liquid PC, as its creators have tabbed it, has too many old parts to be very powerful, but it will run the operating system Windows XP.

With the older parts and the reality that the mineral oil eventually will break down, Mr. Phillippi said he doesn’t know how long the computer will hold up.

In the meantime, he has already displayed it — to wide-eyed stares — in the school’s Omniplex and may use it as a recruiting tool.

“A lot of people didn’t believe it would work,” Mr. Phillippi said. “Other classes were taking bets to see if it would work.”

Including waiting on parts, assembly of the unit took about two weeks.

In the end, about half a dozen students worked on Liquid P.C.

“Seth did a great job fabricating it,” said Mr. Thompson. “It’s gotten us some attention.”

During a recent class, Mr. Bledsoe gave his classmates a little ribbing for putting him in charge. But he actually like the challenge.

“I’d been wanting to do something like this,” he said. “I guess they knew I would finish it.”