Scratch Build – In Progress Project: Shattered Horizon. Update: 1/12/09 MOTM Nominee?! Ah! Must post pictures!

I set to work getting the internals in a nicer state today. It was all good fun. I got to experiment with high strength adhesives, didn’t cut my self and look at lots of shiny aluminium.

Since I forgot to take my camera to the workshop, lets start with the result of tonight’s work.

I removed the masking from the cover pieces, riveted them to the frame, glued the drivebay sides to their supports and riveted them down too, then made room for the hard drive rack to slide in and be held.

For those people who I confused last time with my talk of seamlessness, maybe this picture will explain it. This the side of the drivebays, and notice the lack of rivets, screws, everything. It is all glued in place and screwed down from the inside.


It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. I caught the center bit of the holesaw when I was drilling the tubing holes…

And caused this:

It was just a little scratched up and I had to finish it off with the jigsaw. It will now definitely need some rubber u-channel around it… I was planning on adding some for tubing protection anyway… yes… of course…

So, I have a few more drive bay bits to work on, then I get to start work on the rad and externals… yey!

Laz

 

i was talking about this mod today at school with a mate..
i love the design of it

sweet work mate

 

Yey! I am a discussion starter...

Anyways, I did a little work. I picked up another of the flare joints which mean I can integrate the radiator at some stage. I also grabbed some more aluminium EA. You can never have enough…

Hard drive rack is done and done. I threw some hard drives in a day or so ago and left it overnight to see if it moved. Very happy that it didn’t. I was a little concerned about the amount of vertical movement, so I added two little bits of Aluminium EA to prevent it. They can be seen on the top in this pic:


I also decided to start work on the rear IO plate. So, I needed to remount the M/B. This is not how you do it.

So, measuring and drawing after cutting a piece from my huge piece of aluminium. I meant to take a picture before I started cutting, but I forgot. Here is one from when I remembered.

After a little bit of time with the jigsaw and some files, I had this… A start.

Some more time with my friend the jigsaw…


I actually started bending before I stopped for the evening, but no pictures of that yet. I am still working on getting the bends nice.

Laz

 

A suggestion, the place where the i/o panel goes looks not straight. Get some guideline along it (a stainless steel piece). So you can file onto the stainless steel piece. It makes the work much straighter.

 

You should file these cuttings to get a better result. That looks impure.

 

Hmm... well, given that I just snapped one of the breaks between the PCI covers... I think a redo is in order. I will make this one straighter, I promise...

 

A very nice start. I love the rad you are using, very cool (pardon the pun ). I will be watching.

 

Ok... I am not dead, and the project has not been abandoned...

I am leaving for the US tomorrow, where I am spending 10 weeks, and with uni and all sorts of preparations, I have been completely unable to work on the case. It is a very sad sort of happenings. On the other hand, going to the states does afford me the chance to pick up all sorts of happy hardware...

So, see you in 2 and a half months, hopefully with hardware and a head full of ideas...

Laz

 

no updates.!

lol
i did that at stat of last year

its awesome fun!

enjoy yourself

 

For those that doubted me… I live!

The states was nice, though tiring. Working with a whole lot of kids was great fun, though inspired me to never seek them myself. Oh well. As promised, I did come back with parts and a head full of ideas. First, the exciting part, parts! (he he, you see what I did there?)

So, we can see what is going into this thing:
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P
Intel 920 D0
6GB Patriot Viper 1600MHz
PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W Quad (Blue)
Heatkiller v3.0 (Needs nickel plating to match the GFX)
Koolance VID-275

I also bought me 2x 1TB Caviar Greens, but they were not exciting enough to be featured (actually, I photographed them separately, then deemed them boring, everyone knows what a hard drive looks like). I have a Sparkle GTX 275 coming, because it was damn near impossible to find a blue PCB 275 with a reference board design.
I know the PC Power and Cooling 750W is a little old, but it is hard to find front and back draw PSUs above about 400W, which I need. If you look at the pictures of the case with floor in, you will see why.

Anyways, on to the equally exciting stuff, progress! First thing I did when I got back was take one look at the HDD cage and go ‘that is backwards, the cables wont run nicely’. This meant I needed to take it apart, replace the top bars, reverse the guides and rivet it back together. Took longer than I would have liked, for very little difference. Oh well, the cables will work now.
Another advantage of doing this is that I could add some vibration reduction. I sandwiched a little of this foam between the joins.


Now, we needed something to run the hard drives, so it was time to start work on that file server I had planned. I had acquired an Atom a while ago for a purpose like this (actually for lightweight web-browsing, but shh, it works) so I started working on a way to integrate it in the case (the drivebays were made as wide as they were just for this). A sheet of aluminium became the tray, and a little bit of canny hiding allowed for an OS compact flash drive.



After this, I rewired my PicoPSU, sleeved everything, added fans, etc and had this:



Given that all the wires are directly attached to the board, I think that is some pretty neat cabling… It is not cable tidy from hell, despite what it looks like. I test booted FreeNAS with the 2x 1TB HDD attached and it works nicely. I was a little worried about the PSU there.

I have actually integrated this into the case, but no pics yet (they are boring anyway, just 2 drive bay sides…

Anyways, just letting you know I am alive…

Laz

 

Good to hear you are alive and well, and enjoyed your time in my little corner of the world. Nice work on the NAS! (oh, yeah, and all that other stuff too!)

 

That's some really nice gear you got yourself there, great progress mate .

 

Really nice project; I'm following how the sanded matt aluminium will turn out as I need to do the same myself.

Going to be noisy with 10 fans and closely-spaced fins on the radiator - will you be using 38mm thick fans?

 

Integrating a fileserver into the case - nice touch!

 

Yes ModMinded, the states was a blast. I miss your internet... really. Aussie internet just pales in comparison. Oh well, I don't miss working with hundreds of kids each day, well, not very much.

Thanks Boy, I am pretty happy with it, but I haven't started using it yet, so I guess I am just happy with the numbers...

Monkey, I hope the aluminium turns out nicely too... if not I guess I can always paint it. Also, I am hoping that with 10 fans and such a huge radiator I can set the fan speeds incredibly low to keep it quiet. I don't know if the closely spaced fins will be such an issue as there are no folds, I am hoping it will be fairly airflow friendly, but I should perform a test. I will add that to my list of things to do.

Stonedsurd, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too ;-)

Anyways, I meant to post this yesterday, but I had to run… so here we go, a small update. I have done a little bit of work. I got the NAS into the case, with no issues whatsoever. I love it when things work as planned. I also made up a power cable for the drives. Yey cables!
Then I laid out the board and measured and cut holes for cable routing. I want this nice and neat, not like my current computer, Interference (I might post pics at some stage, it is pretty boring though, black and silver with blue LEDs…).

I also put together all the components and tested them. No stress tests, just wanted to ensure that I had working sticks of RAM and the power supply was ok before I voided my warranty with a screw driver and sleeving.

Oh, pictures!
The ITX board in place, along with drives. Sorry I forgot to rotate it, I am sure you will manage.

Another shot:

And the mobo tray measured:

Cut and in place:

I contemplated cutting a hole for access to the CPU backplate (hence the sketchy marking) but decided against it. If I need to change cooling in this box then it means messing with the WC loop, I think if it comes to that, I can just take out the MB. It is only 9 screws after all.

I rewired the fans for the NAS box this evening, but that is a boring update. It is now inaudible at a metre though, which is pretty important for an always on box. I have been procrastinating about remaking the back of the box, but that will probably happen soon. Then I need to get me some acrylic (in the proper width this time, the strip I ordered at the start of the project was 4mm too narrow… I forgot to account for frame width.) and make up the front.

I should probably mount the radiator properly too…

Laz

 

You may as well cut the hole behind the CPU socket, it really does make stripping the loop down much easier and quicker, plus you don't see it with the mobo installed. I cut a hole in my mobo tray behind the CPU and it made things so easy when I had to change my NB cooler. I would have had to completely dismantle my loop to change the cooler if I didn't have access to the CPU block back plate, it ended up being a 20min job instead of a 3 hour job lol.

 

Great Idea, what yor OS choice? Debian? Slack?
or Something more specific like freeNAS?

 

I was originally planning to run a cut down XP on it, gave up, swapped to FreeNAS, never going back. It saves me the issue of wiring in a KVM (although I did have one lying around) and does everything I want. I still need to get some help from a friend who is more familiar with *nix than me, write some Python so I can use it has a headless jukebox by running mplayer from the command line after I have SSH'ed in. The python is just the creation of a playlist application which will allow me to create a playlist and then have the NAS create commands to play items (which should be stored on the HDDs) from that playlist. I might need to somehow wire in a play/pause button and a skip button. Those are just vague ideas at this stage, but should be doable using a modified LIRC (or so I imagine...).

Laz

 

I have been working on this, I swear, I have just made no real progress, so an update was kind of useless. Some of you may remember that I was going to remake the motherboard backplate. Turns out that this is a lot harder than it should be. Here is my second attempt, pre-bending.

Although it looks nice there, bending is not good for it, especially considering the thinness of the metal around the Motherboard I/O. So… onto make three…

Third time lucky! I got it to work. I still haven’t cut out the MB I/O as I was short on time, but it is on its way. No risks of breakages this time! OK, that is a lie, I had two minor cracks on that third one, but nothing that cannot be easily and invisibly remedied.

I also voided a warranty and started sleeving, this will take a while, and a lot more sleeve…


I was helping a friend put together his case as well, so next time I am working with him I might grab some pics, it is a pretty cool design.

Until then, I am waiting on 10 more metres of sleeve…
Laz

 

Last update was over a month ago! Yikes! I really should get more organised. I have been working slowly over the last month and so there is not as much progress here as there should be. Oh well, I will claim that this is because of work and university… not because of Team Fortress 2 or anything like that… No… not at all.

Anyways, to begin with, I got a whole lot of wonderful parts. Yey! Parts! Most of these will be revealed as we go on, simply because I didn’t bother to take photos of them, or because they need work before they are useful.
Anyhows, here is a list:
10x Fans for the top Radiator
EK Multioption 250 (which really is beautiful, I must say)
10m of thin cable sleeve… yey!
A lot of barbs and accessories (1/2”)
Slimline DVD drive (because I accidentally filled up the space I was going to put a full size one in…)
ATX power cable extension
4m of 7/16” tubing
Probably little things that I have forgotten.

I started work on some of the electronics, using a kit I picked up that did almost exactly what I was after, enabled the changing of output voltages using a jumper. I intend to replace the jumper control with a control which is triggered by the touch sensitive electrics behind the front panel, but I have not got that circuit designed yet. Should be a pair of flip-flops through logic gates to transistor switches, but I will run it past an electrical engineering friend of mine first. Now, this circuit can drop 12V in down to 5V, 6V, 9V out, perfect for a fan controller. The supporting documentation stated that it was limited to about 350mA for a voltage drop of 7V, useless, given I want to run 1.5A off it. However, the documentation made the mistake of listing that the main limiting factor on the current supported by the circuit was heat, and demonstrated that the larger the heatsink, the more current it could deal with. Us computer users are very understanding of the policy ‘bigger heatsink = more volts allowed’ as applies to overclocking. Turns out it works for other electronics too. Thus, I broke out a heatsink off an old Celeron or Pentium 3 or something and modified it to fit the voltage regulators and darlington pair on the board. Now it should be able to deal with all the current easily.
Here it is with the modified heatsink, the original is next to it. Big improvement, yes?


Now, what good is a fan controller without fans? I grabbed ten Arctic Cooling F12 Pros. No idea how they perform, but I am hoping they do as well as the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro, Regardless of this lack of information, I pushed on since they do look nice, which was a plus. Also, they were being sold in bulk, which is a plus when you need 10 of them for a ridiculously large rad.
They look like this:

I know, quite odd. Those bits on the corner are silicone and made to reduce vibration.
They do have a little bit of an issue though, as this photo makes a little more clear:

They are 38mm fans! Gyah! I only have room in the top of my case for 25mm fans! On the plus side though, they are 38mm fans. Thus, I decided to use them. Cut and replace the side beams on the case, reposition the fan mounts… Perfect! Though too much work.

As for how the fans are? Awesome. Completely inaudible at 9V, though they don’t shift huge amounts of air. Less worrying when you have 10 of them though… Oh, and they run at 3V, much to my surprise.

Now, onto the case itself. Asides from rebuilding the frame to accommodate the new fans, I built the first few panels. Here is the case as it stands:

The back is on, which means I finally got to get that very delicate back panel piece out of my hands.

There is a great gaping hole at the bottom for the PSU. I discovered that the only way to get the PSU in was to slide it in from the back since I can’t lift up the internal piece anymore with the I/O in place. It goes in like this:

The extra power plug on the left is for power for the ITX board and the pump.

Now, best for last. I got my Heatkiller 3.0 block nickel plated. It is shiny.


And all back together:


So, until next time… which is hopefully earlier than a month…

Laz