Hello everyone! I've been lurking around the forums for years and finally decided to take the plunge at modding! I figured since I'm a noob I should try and start small so I'm going to start with a custom motherboard tray. My hope is to get some advice from the experts here to minimize mistakes and "do overs". Here is my general concept: a flat motherboard tray (no back panel) made of acrylic sandwiched between two pieces of aluminum with LEDs to make the exposed edges light up. Sounds simple enough but I have already thought of numerous questions regarding this! The 2 primary questions areas are: 1) Acrylic Cast or extruded Brand or type (for example. some seem geared for edge lighting) Minimum thickness to achieve this (LEDs will be on the face, not the edge) Do I use clear with rough (not polished) edges to get glow 2) LEDs Use strips or individual LEDs Brand or type (looks like 5050 might be the way to go) Can RGB LEDs be used to provided so I'm not limited to a specific color scheme After that I should be able to start moving without worring about wasting too much money, supplies, and time. My hope is to turn this into a mini-worklog for this "simple" endeavor. Thanks for the help and wish me luck!!
1: Cast. Extruded melts way too easily. -Brand will depend on who you buy from. Edge effect plexi is just really weakly colored so the color only shows on the edges. It's also overpriced. Brushed surfaces. ok... since it's going to be sanded you can do whatever inside, right? So I would use the strip LEDs. Use clear 1/4" plexi to make a box deep enough to fit the strips facing out toward the edge. I would also fuse enough plexi layers together that the aluminum could be screwed to it. Of course, you could just use thicker plexi, but your tools/skills are unknown. The above suggestion would be the easiest and cheapest route.
Thanks, Cheapskate! I'll avoid the edge lighting and get some clear, cast acrylic and brush the edges. You lost me a little after saying to use the 1/4" plexi. I was going to try and use 3/16" or 0.177 to keep it as thin as possible. I was thinking of placing the strip on the surface (not edge) by maybe routing out a small channel. The goal is to be subtle with the light, not a bright edge like in Tron. Can this work? Also, assuming the roughness (or smoothness) of the edge will also determine how bright the edges will be. Undecided how to attached the aluminum to the acrylic. Since it's suppose to be thin maybe an epoxy? Otherwise I thought of drilling through the 3-layer motherboard tray, using a female-female standoff, and screwing from the motherboard and from the bottom to sandwich it together.
