The New Black - Faceplate engraving test 01 OCT 06

Constructacon - good to see someone else on here from Brisbane... but wivenhoe got about 15mm the other day, so it isnt all looking like caked mud

In your pic, is that an airbrushed welding mask? we have one of those in red with some sweet flames on it in the workshop we do motorsport stuff for uni. It rocks

Black is a bitch, but your plans for this look great. Will the the lcd stand out too much when it's off? i know some end up looking a darkish grey...that wouldnt do well for a stealth case.

Keep it up.

 

That's one of the areas that's still up in the air. Initially the idea I had was to replace them with a piece of frosted acrylic and have them lit in different colours by LED. My concern with that is how to avoid the "hot spot" of where the LED is. My other idea is to just fill them with tinted acrylic painted black on the back for the shiny black look. I'm still open to ideas as to what to do there so please feel free to suggest. I suppose they could be turned into buttons but I really have no need for them that I can think of. Suggestions anyone?

I'm not sure what you're talking about - I don't have anything like that in my workshop. If you're refering to my avatar, that's a cap I had airbrushed at the Big Day Out (massive music festival for the rest of the world). It now sits on an Easter Island head in my loungeroom.

As for will the screen show through the tinted acrylic when off - I don't know. I'm going to have to wait and see but I'm hoping not. I guess if it's deemed too visible I can always add window tinting to it.

@cire9753 - I've only just come accross the information that Powerstrip (the program you use to control the settings for the LCD) will actually tell you if your card has the feature (whether the option is greyed out or not). I've yet to test this myself. I think I will as it could potentially save me a heap of extra bother.

 

Time for a small update. Not a lot has been happening this week on the project. It's been raining so I've had to fit in painting where I could.

The chasis components have all now had (several) coats of matt black paint. My makeshift spray booth in the garage.




I found that the paint scratched off really easily and even in some cases just washed off in a sheet. This was because I didn't sand the comonents first before painting. Or it could be because of the cool moist air. The motherboard support rail and backplate got a sand back to bare metal and were repainted. I'm hoping that after painting them with a clearcoat this weekend that everything will prove to be a little hardier.

The painted acrylic turned out to be fantastic. Exactly as planned. Unfortunately when cutting the slot for the DVD one end of the thin section at the top cracked out when I drilled the ends. As it turns out I'm kind of glad it did as the slot wasn't all that straight to begin with. I'm now investigating getting the slot cut by the same guy who will be laser engraving the buttons.

Even though this is now a trial piece, I wanted to test to make sure my concept of an LCD behind the acrylic was sound. I appologise for the quality of these pics as having a flash gave them huge glare and didn't really represent how it looked in real life. These are a close approximation:

The acylic by itself. I'm hoping that once the LCD is behind there and is sealed off from light sources that the screen cutout isn't so noticible.


The LCD just resting behind the acrylic. Looking almost invisible there.


Now that's what I'm talking about Well the concept proves sound. I just need to get a cleaner cut piece of acrylic for the front now.


Also this week I made great progress on my special lighting circuit (more about that in future posts). Special thanks to lamcdonald over at OCAU for that.

Well that about does it for now. Hopefully this weekend I'll be able to give some of this a lick of clear coat and start assemling.

Until next time....

 

hey, i seen your work on ocau gotta love it too, i love the airbrushed black

 

Looks good and i think your right about the slot in the plexi it'll definately look better straight.
Looking forward to seeing it assembled.
Cheers
-Belial

 

You have probably already thought of how you are going to mount that slim optical drive, but I had a thought.

Could you not rip the guts out of an old standard CD-ROM drive and use its frame to secure the slim drive?

Cool project!

 

This is looking good, and good is good, as I am in the market to subscribe to another thread, and I guess this is it. Great work. So how is it down under at the moment? Cleared up yet?
Great mod subscribed

 

Well not much has happened this week. Real life interfering and all. I did however get to the laser engraver. I got the existing faceplate engraved with the touch button logos, to see if my concept would work before I proceeded too much further. I'm happy to say that it was a success.

The flash really washes out the background in this picture and makes the logo's more visible, but in normal light it's pretty hard to see them. When I'm finished there will be very little ambient light reflected back through making them even harder to see.


And here we see the faceplate with only 3 LEDs behind it. Ultimately each logo will be illuminated by it's own LED(s)


After seeing the work that these guys can do, I got them to cut me a brand new faceplate out with the slot included. The DVD slot is now straight and it sits in perfectly into the bezel. This has already been painted and is ready to go back for engraving. Except for one dilemma.......

As many of you would have guessed, the logo on the right hand side will not actually be a button but be a HDD activity light. With my (soon to be purchased) watercooling setup I plan on using a 240x120mm radiator with 2xfans on it. Having never used 120mm fans I don't know how effective/quiet they are. I'm tossing up whether replace the 5th logo with a button to increase fan voltage from 7V to 12V and have the power logo change colour when there is drive activity. I'm thinking of using these fans. Would undervolting them be unneccessary? Opinions?

 

23.5 dB(A)
Depends on how quiet you want it, 7 volting them is feasible.
These are quieter.
Really depends on how much noise you can have. And how deep your pocket is.

 

You can get a IDE to SATA converter board for your CD Rom drive.

 

tell you the truth r4tchet i wouldnt go with silenx, i have one and either its rattling or its the fan , but when i squeeze the sides the noise goes away... but anyways, i would get an akasa or something like that, heard more good things.

 

hm my silenx is freaking quiet, mabe you got a bad one, i cant hear a thing when i put both of em to my ear

 

very nice project.. looking great..

 

I like the hidden indicators! kudos!

 

I woudln't buy silenx. They are not anything special, just severly overpriced ADDA's. As in, $35 canadian for a single SilenX 120. If you want something a bit cheaper, try Yate Loon D12SL12's in Orange (the orange ones work better than the black ones), and a nice coat of paint. And a resistor. Those are only about 4 bucks apiece at jab.

 

looking great! i love this mod, and the combination of the ps1 screen and the smoked/black plexi. and with the fan on the front of the case, will you sit it inside the hole, or set it behind it.
edit: aha, oops. didnt realize this was from a year ago... my bad..

 

Thanks for the compliment. Not to worry. TNB hasn't been forgotten. It's boxed up in anticipation of a house move that never happened. I hope to be back on the case soon (no pun intended). MAME Over is absorbing all my time for the moment. But once that's done, expect to see a thread revival

 

Proud to see two german beers in australia

And happy to see a PSOne-Display working on Nvidia. Have you durther Information about that? I bout one for me but i never made it run on my pc...