My first mod or actually my first sober mod, no drunkenly hacking on things with tin snips and then being disgusted by it later on. Going to be changing some leds, adding some switches, and at last fixing and modding a fan controller. I kind of want to add some light to the inside so I can see that the fans are still spinning(with what I paid I'm surprised they all worked out of the box), but I'm not sure how I'm going to add light to the interior without creating light beaming out the perforated steel front. This actually started in about November, but between getting sick and a slow death in the family it pretty much stopped for 2 months. So on to the victim, a compucase blitz, and yeah I know its a cheap knock off of half dozen other cases, but not everyone can afford to chop up a lianli. That's not a cell phone pic, its was a free point n shoot and it has no manual focus or iso selection, but it's totally worth what I paid for it. My first solder joint, yeah I know it looks terrible. I had problems with not enough hands, how does one control solder, wire, led, and the iron all at once? The leds were held in place by by some plastic clips, quick google search for 5mm led holder will net you them and ones that look a lot nicer. The black and white wires go to a switch to shut off the lights on the case(obviously). BTW does anyone know if the motherboard would be bothered by linking the negative power side of the power and hdd? Not going to do it, but I am a bit curious. Now to the fan controller and its issues. The resister layout isn't consistent, 2 of the resisters are placed in the middle of the 2 leds requiring 3 separate channels to turn the leds off, only thing I could think of to fix that problem is to run it through relays. Lamptron did awesome job on the soldiering, its so good it has intermittent contact on one of the fan channels, so yeah I'll have to fix that. I might as well change out the leds since I'm messing with it. I flipped the second pic so the trace is easier to follow. Removal of the components took about a week of work, more first times with a soldiering iron. The lead free solder proved difficult to remove, a better tip probably would have helped, maybe a better solder sucker too. After remelting the solder around the pot the problem got worse, the channel worked for a split second then stopped. Removing the pot was a pain as well, I was able to remove most of the solder around the mounts but not on the terminals(my solder sucker apparently sucks more figuratively then literally), I ended up breaking out the heat gun to melt the solder while pulling the pot from the front side. I burned my hand a couple of times and when the solder began to liquefy the pcb began to stink I have no idea how hot that heat gun gets but at this point the only thing I have to lose is time. Oops is from the soldering iron I disassembled the pot, and well it looks like it got a little too hot, and you can't really see it but that metal layer is actually broken in one spot. How much of this was me and how much was lamptron, who knows. My soldering iron really isn't made for pcb work as there's no temp adjustment, lead free solder did me no favors here. I had a pic of the plastic side that looked slightly melted, but the pic didn't turn out, I'll take another later. I know from my ohm meter that these are 1.5k ohm potentiometers, problem is no one seems to sell 1.5k ohm pcb mount pots. This was probably a special order lamptron made I'm going to order a 1k pot that should work, it should just lose 33% of the bottom end... that is if I understand how the circuit works.
