Use an Adafruit HalloWing to Make a Miniature 3D-Printed Macintosh SE

There’s a pretty good chance a Macintosh was your first computer, or you at least used one at school. The original Macintosh, released in 1984, was a smash hit and Apple heavily promoted their computers to schools for educational use. A few years later, in 1987, Apple released both the Macintosh SE and the larger Macintosh II. The latter doesn’t have a whole lot of nostalgic appeal, probably because it was ugly, but you can follow Adafruit’s guide to make a tiny 3D-printed Macintosh SE with a HalloWing.

The AdafruitHalloWing M0 Express is one of the more interesting development boards on the market. It runs on a powerful ATSAMD21G18 microcontroller, and has a built-in 1.44" 128x128 full-color TFT display, a 3-axis accelerometer, a light sensor, a speaker driver, and LiPo battery circuitry. It also has a unique skull design, with teeth that act as capacitive touch buttons. With all of that functionality built right in, it’s a great choice for small projects like the Mini Mac SE.

To build this, all you’re need is the HalloWing, access to a 3D printer, and a small speaker. Optionally, you can use a 500mAh LiPo battery if you want to make it portable. Just print out the parts, and everything simply snaps together! Then you can flash the provided CircuitPython code to make it work. That gives you sweet Macintosh images and sound effects, and you can always add to the code to personalize it!