Shaping upper shroud acrylic, day 2 I started by cutting the other end. This time I was wiser and drilled holes in the ends of the cuts to make it less prone to ripping: As you can see, from proper angle yesterdays achievements do not look so bad: I tried new trick and used iron wire to force the acrylic to the inmost point: And found out that it was a bad idea; wire left just too heavy marks: To lessen the need of muscle force in stretching the acrylic down I clamped 12.5 kilos worth clay with spring to the border of the acrylic: After many hours and lots of , sweating, cursing, iterating and trying out new tools to punish the acrylic with, here I am: And without the mold: It still has lots of irregularities and the concave parts are not yet as deep as I had hoped for, but I am not desperate yet. It gets better every hour. However, I am already considering doing a second one with different methodology and taking the one that looks best.. This one screams "home-made" right now with big neon sign, and that's not what I'm aiming at. You can discuss this entry at the discussion thread.
Whats the purpose of the shaping again? besides me not understanding congrats on the good looking work, pretty smooth for punishing it that much. EDIT: 300th post!!!!!!!!!!!
Plans on what's to come Now that I'm taking a break from being nasty to innocent acrylic, here are some blueprints about my future plans. First chart of overall placement of the components, from the front: And then reservoir in particular; the version that contains peltiers: The latter one is a cross-section from up looking down. Bright red marks the hot side of the peltiers, deep blue the cold side. The discussion thread.
Reservoir visual scetch As the previous reservoir image was only a technical drawing, I drew a quick scetch of how the reservoir might actually look like: The idea is that the main body is of clear plastic, and then hose connections and upper and lower parts are covered with black plastic that looks partly organic and is covered with shiny lacquer.
DVD drive art concept Here is one of my ideas about how to cover the DVD drives: The rectangles are outlines of the drives. The idea is that the areas marked with darker red are windows showing innards of the drive and brighter red ones are just lit acrylic. My plan is to light the sections based on drive activity; the more activity, the more sections are lit. I have placed the windows so that only thing visible is the rotating disk.
Going for µC As I needed a break from stretching acrylic, I laid my eyes on the rest of the case - what parts have been planned with enough to work on. And yes, I could implement DVD drive covers, had I exact plan about the top cover decoration. And as artwork and lighting tie together, I needed to prototype the lighting to see how it looks. I had planned to control HDD and DVD activity lighting with just basic components like capacitors, resistors and diodes, but I felt them a bit hard to prototype. as I do not have too much different kind of electrical components lying around, so I should have had to buy dozen of components just to see what I could do with them. Thus I went and purchased PIC microcontroller, construction kit for PIC programmer and miscellanous supplemental tools: Here is close-up of the PIC chip itself: Now to soldering the programmer kit.. . The discussion thread.
Hey, really nice project! I have one question regarding the fan shroud. Are you really absolutely positive you want it in acrylic? It seems to me it will be horribly difficult to do. If it is not completely necessary to make it transparent, epoxi-fiberglass combo would be much easier. You would have to paint it of course, but you could get a perfect shape with the mould you made. If you want fancy looks -> of course you also have carbon fiber, but that's more difficult to work with - especially if you want it unpainted - natural look... Not forcing anything, merely a suggestion Keep on the good work...
Thanks! Yeah, worth considering. I have some ideas about how to make that thing from acrylic, but if they do not work out, some semi-transparent laminating epoxy might also work.. I am thinking that filling and sanding the mold really flush and then giving it few coats of teflonspray might be enough so that I could get the laminate layer separated from the mold in the end. It would mean then *a lot* of sanding and filing and polishing, but hey, I'm not here to take the easiest path . But yes, I want it transparent enough to give it several tries still .
Is there any place you could take the shroud mold to have the acrylic vacuum-formed around it? That would be ideal, I think... and I agree, having it be clear would look great. Good luck with whatever you try. Nice job so far.
Thanks! I am yet to find proper place for vacuum-forming. The other solutions I have in mind include doing negative mold to be used together with the positive one, constructing the shroud from pieces using acrylic glue and using some clear casting resin. I currently have acrylic pieces melting in acetone to test out DIY water-thin acrylic glue, as I have not been able to locate ready-made one.
Zds what an awsome worklog mate! i really love what your doing with plex! and that you accomplish it the way you do is even more amazing, cudos mate
Thermoelectric findings and plans I have been planning and re-planning waterloops, tubing and TEC (Thermoelectric Cooling module) placing quite a lot lately. My plan is to have secondary PC PSU to run TECs and have PIC microcontroller running on its standby power and starting it up and shutting it down when needed - and of course controlling TECs. While searching for information on what’s a best way to set up TECs, I ran into an article in Electronics Cooling about how to select TEC configuration that gives best results per watt. Some of the charts were eye-opening, like this: As you can see, contrary to popular belief, it is possible to get much better than 0.4-0.7 for CoP (coefficient of performance; amount of heat (W) pumped per power (W) fed to TEC). If you run your TECs at low enough voltage and design your system to have low ΔT, you can far beyond CoP of 1, even close to compressor-cooler territory (CoP of 2-9). In laymans terms: if you throw in more TECs and run them at lower voltages, you can pump a lot more heat with same amount of electricity. I knew it was not recommended to run TECs at more than 80% of their nominal voltage, but if the graph above holds true to Kryotherm modules, it means I might want to run my TECs as low as 20-25% of the nominal voltage. This means that with bigger up-front cost (buying more TEC modules) you can reduce your systems electricity consumption, or get better cooling with consumption remaining equal. I am now considering buying 4-6 172W modules (DRIFT-0,8) instead of 4-6 80W ones.. Costs a pretty penny, but hey, what wouldn’t I do to have a case that re-defines overkill? You can discuss this post in the discussion thread.
Thermoelectric findings and plans Thanks a lot! I have been busy elsewhere lately, so not much actualy modding has got done. But I have drawn literally dozens of papers full of scetches and plans and I think I have matured my ideas about waterloops and reservoirs almost enough to start actually making first prototypes. And a little update, altough purely on theory side: Thermoelectric findings and plans
TEC calculations I found very handy TEC information and simulation tool from Kryotherm website. Now I am beginning to discover how peculiar devices TECs really are. After finding out how much CoP (coefficient of performance, amount of heat pumped divided by amount of power supplied) is affected by voltage and temperature gradient I decided to go for the most powerful (in terms of heat pumping capability) Kryotherm model, DRIFT-0.8. Here its specifications: 29,90 € Qmax: 172W Umax: 24,6V Imax: 11,3A DTmax: 69°C Size: 40 x 40 x 3,2mm Weight: 20g Using the Kryotherm simulator I searched for the best combination in terms of cost, cooling capability and power usage. Below are two graphs showing how number of DRIFT-0.8 modules and radiator/waterloop efficiency affects the TEC power draw (in Watts). Temperature of the cold side of the elements was kept at constant 16°C. This temperature was chosen since it's my best guess for lowest condensation-safe temperature in finnish climate. Ambient temperature was assumed to be 22°C. In this simulation TECs were connected parallel. For each data point I adjusted the TEC voltage at 0.1K incements until I found the lowest voltage that still kept cold side of the TEC at 16 degrees or cooler. Power draw of TECs was then written down, and is shown in the graph below. In the Y axis is power consumed by the TECs (W). In X axis is the number of DRIFT-0.8 elements used. Each line represents certain K/W (or C/W, if you prefer) value at 0.1 intervals. Here the thermal load is assumed to be 200W (estimated maximum power draw for high power AMD system with Radeon X800XT): Here the thermal load is assumed to be 120W (estimated maximum power draw for high power AMD system GPU stress): Looking at these, the optimal point for my purposes seems to be between 4 and 6 modules (inclusive). That would be 120 to 180 euros.. Cheaper than phase-changing system, but still a lot of money. The reason why I added four different K/W levels is that I want the machine to run as silent as possible. This means that under normal load (no heavy gaming) I could run the fans near the minimum (estimated to be 0.3-0.4 K/W) and under heavy load (gaming) the fans would be allowed to run faster (0.1-0.2 K/W). I know 0.1K/W is fairly low even for watercooled system, but remember that I am using a car radiator and six 120mm fans. I have to say I am pretty amazed to what you can do with peltiers. They cost a pretty penny, but 60W extra power to keep your CPU and GPU cooler at constant 16 degrees when under maximum load isn't bad at all. And under "just" full CPU load it drops to 26W. What was even more surprising was that if I accept CPU temperatures a bit over 30 degrees Celsius, TECs will draw just one or two Watts of power. This means I can propably have two separate loops. And 30 degrees is not bad at all, if you just want to surf web at stock speed. And for the record: if the 16 degrees sounds to be a bit on the warm side, those TECs can do a lot more, if asked to. With six modules and 12V of power (the highest you can get from regular PC power supply) you could keep the coolant liquid 6 degrees below freezing point, at full 200W load. This of course comes with the cost, in form of 380W of power draw for the peltiers alone. You can discuss this post in the discussion thread.
