Star compact
All this extra working from home has forced things to become a little more compact as work computers and home computers wrestle for the same space. Even without the current restrictions there tends to be items perched on top of eachother due to juggling lots of things at once.
The desk
The unassuming white desk is in fact a second generation design made from a 3m length of kitchen worktop. The first generation was much more elaborate with a mezzanine level on which to put things, and drawers underneath. The flaw in that design? It was built in the room, so when it came to moving house it wasn't possible to get it back out of the door! This design has two 'bays', the one to the left for soldering, the one to the right for typing, with adjacent open shelves to hold things like catalogues and tools. Crucially, it's held together with quarter turn lock bolts so can be dismantled into 5 pieces for house removal.
The panorama
To the far left (below the light switch) is a Tektronix DSO, component drawers, bench power supply, and soldering equipment. That's mostly obscured by the extra monitor connected to a Windows PC (near the desk bay divider) which is on top of a carefully calibrated stack of Digikey boxes - 2 wasn't enough, 4 was too high, 3 was just right.
Next is serial number 00002 prototype Titanium motherboard mounted on a bit of MDF for easy probing with the scope, though as shown it's been given the smaller monitor and sacrificed its mouse as on the day the photo was taken the Windows PC was needed.
Just by Bunsen Honeydew's feet is a Raspberry Pi 4 with trusty Risc PC doubles both as a monitor stand and a plinth on which to keep various loose nuts and nick-nacks that would otherwise be lost.
The higher monitor is wall mounted (not balanced on top!) and connects to another beige Windows PC under the desk. It's actually the same PC as from 2001, though it's had several new motherboards, a new power supply, new drives, but is otherwise the same one. When sitting upright changing which monitor is in focus only requires moving eyeballs up or down.
Beside the beige PC are various vintages of wireless networking to test all the connection methods of the Pi's WiFi software, and a switch that will dial down to 10baseT for Ethernet testing.
Finally - a glass of water waits patiently on a coaster made from an offcut of circuit board.
The learning
So what did we learn? When you build a desk, 16 sockets is not enough.
Other Computer setups
If you want to add yours, send us send a pic and an intro on your RISC OS related setup (email to markstephens At idrsolutions.com), and we will add it.