26th February 2004 Doomsday Removed the clamps and the silicon had hardened fully. Thought I should give it a try right away, getting really excited now Faced two problems.. #1 - The hole for filling water was pretty small.. Didn't really think about this before, lol. Have to get some sort of filling funnel (is that the right word? ). #2 - It's leaking Ah well, found it was leaking at two spots.. So I grabbed my dear silicon tube and redid these areas. Have to wait for it to dry now :/ Oh, tested the bubbles aswell, they are alot smaller than they were the last time I tried. Success Hopefully this thing will be done tonight and I can get some good bubble photos Just ordered a UV-cathode by the way
26th February 2004 @ 7PM Amazing.. It's finaly sealed Not much to say. It looks pretty good. Will test with some LED's tomorow, see if it's actually noticable. Without bubbles (just a few sticking to the plexi ) And... With bubbles! I do realize these pics aren't exactly the best, I'll try to get some more pics tomorow with a better background and as I said, with some LED's to see if I can get any effect from them.
Sorry, fixed now.. You have no idea how hard it is to resize a picture to the right size without actually choosing the number of pixels MS Paint rox
They are indeed quite cheap. But what is 'wrong' with them? I've been using a 550W on my PC, and my brother is using a 450W one.. without ANY problems... I even accidently shortcutted the molex 12V line, and it wouldn't start up right after, but about an hour later, it did ! and it still works perfectly. I measured the outcom (5v and 12v) and they are very close to the supposed value's.. so thats good too.. now, what could be wrong with them?? (bought psu are the 'dual fan gold' type's) L sorry to hijack
Been a while since the last update. I've been really busy with school and my website lately, but I've got some work done First of all, the water tank's bottom cracked. Before you ask, I have no idea how. I had it filled with water for days to test if there were any leaks, and one morning there was a small crack in the middle of the bottom plexi peice. So I redid the bottom, this time applying silicon very nicely. I should actually do the whole tank again a little larger than the last one, and with a more professional touch to it, but I don't have time ( have to get the case ready for The Gathering in early April :| ) I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you down. I bought a window kit It was really cheap, cheaper than making it myself, and I was afraid it would look crap if I tried to do it myself. Either way, it's been done now. Sorry mates. (Pics are still clickable for larger versions) As you can see, nicely cut out peice of plexi. Case door with masking tape applied to it as cutting guide. Cutting line drawn with a pen and the little ring that came with the kit. I don't have any pictures of me cutting the hole, but it's pretty straight forward- drilled a hole, used my jigsaw as seen in earlier pics to cut the hole. I was quite surprised about how nicely I managed to cut, I had expected I would destroy the whole door Ooh, artistic photo of me putting a new peice on the dremel Oo, redeyes. Yes I am quite aware that I need a haircut Once again a lack of pics of me putting the window into the side door. My camera was out of power and I had to recharge it :/ Eeek the cable mess, I know. Thats next in line I'm actually pretty ashamed, cause I made the water tank thinking I would make a window that matched it, and now I have a window thats too big. You can see the edge of the tank as well as a bit of the top :/ In the dark. The blue thing is a lighted SATA cable. That's going to be removed and replaced with either a standard SATA cable or a UV-reactive one. My UV CCFL with a dual inverter. No one has replied to the cathode throbber thread on this, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to use that circuit (the cathode throbber on allmighty Bit-Tech) with my dual inverter. I have my doubts. I might have to buy a new cathode if it doesn't, I really want some throbbing And before anyone asks, no, I'm not gonna use that button It came with the inverter. Ironic, but this just might be the prettiest part of my case so far These knobs looks teh sexy imo, nicely brushed aluminium ones. They are going on my fan controller. Not sure wether I'm going to use a LM317 circuit or the Nomads 555 PWM circuit featured on lord cpemmas site. It might be overkill for a couple of standard 80x80/120x120 case fans, but anything advanced attracts me The knight rider HDD activity meter as featured on Bit-Tech I know the elco is overkill, but it's the only one I had at 47uF This is the cathode throbber PCB, the wrong way around.. I did the same thing with the HDD activity meter, I don't know how I do it though... I must have put the ink side the wrong way when I UV-lighted it. I'm really bad at figuring out that kind of stuff though Ah well, gonna give it another try on Tuesday at school Also got ahold of this white thing for braiding my PSU cables and such. It's supposedly UV-reactive, but I think it's basicly just white We all know how white stuff reacts to UV lighting. That's all the pics I have for now. What's left to do? Hmm.. Quite alot Making a fanbus (figuring out which one I want) Find out if I can use the cathode throbber with my dual inverter Braiding and shortening the PSU cables Shortening all the other cables (fans etc) Drilling holes in a spare 5.25" bay for the HDD meter Making a stereo VU-meter (PCB layout is ready) Drilling holes for the leds on the stereo VU-meter (10 leds on each side of the front) Find a rubber stopper for the filling hole on the water tank (lol) Other stuff I probably forgot Right. That's about it I think. Edit: whoops, forgot this forum doesnt allow HTML.. Made the pics use BBcode now
Update: w00t. Finaly made macromans cathode throbber. Again with the oversized caps I hate these caps, they don't have a minus down the side of them like other caps do, so I don't know if I even put it the right way Hmm.. Electrolytic caps usually pop if you put em the wrong way around though, don't they? Well, it doesn't seem to work all that well. I don't know if it's the circuit (cap the wrong way or something), the inverter or the cathode (UV)... The inverter is kind of fancy, with blue LED's and two outputs, but I'm thinking this might be a disadvantage if I want to use this circuit. Basicly what happens when I fire it up is that the cathode starts to light up in one end, then basicly just stays like that, with a small variation in the amount that is lit up. I'm going to buy a blue cathode with an inverter thats hopefully just right for this. I really want to get this circuit working as it will give the case soo much more effect than just a case with a couple of leds, fanbus and a window The CCFL inverter. I have to say I really don't like this inverter. I don't want people to see the inverter, so the two blue leds in it is starting to annoy me. I might remove them, but I don't know if this would affect the circuit. Another little project I have going. It's a stereo VU meter that I'm going to hook up to my sound card. It's going to have 10 leds per channel. Yes, they are going to be wired. It will be alot easier for me to place them where I want them like that. I just need to get ahold of enough LED's now It says "UberVisualizer", "(c) UberElectronics" on the back of it. A couple of mates and me thought it would be cool to make a little group and try to sell some of these products to other friends w00t. I really love this one This is my fanbus. Three fans, adjustable from about 5V up to 11.8V, using Nomad's PWM 555 circuit as featured on cpemma's site (thanks mate ). I made the PCB myself in an old program called UltiBoard to get the right distance between the pots. I know it could have been done a lot smaller, but I'm going to stick it into an old CD-ROM case, so it doesn't have to be very small. Why the different type of pots? Well, I "borrowed" them from school, and they were the only three at 47k Cleaned out an old CD-ROM case and cut off the connector peice. Pulled out most of the IDE connector pins so I could put 2-pin fan connectors straight onto them. Now I just need to put a few wires from the fanbus PCB down to the connector part and solder them on to the old connectors, and I will have power and fan connectors easily available That's it for now.
Heh, time for a bit of electrical tape! (Just throw some permanent marker on that sucker, a tad of tape and you should be good to go, no more led light ) Anyways, great mod, it looks like this project is going to be a LOT of custom electronics... I envy you!
about the invertor, maybe you could spraypaint it black, thenit wouldnt be as noticable because of the UV ccfl great work anyway
Sorry about the extremly long delay. Some sad things happened (which you can read about later on), so I got pretty demotivated and didn't really want to post about it. Anyway: I got the blue cathode and like I hoped for it had a plain, black inverter that reacted well to the cathode throbber. So time to get started on the cable management. Removed the front.. Boy, that fan controller and temprature display sure was dusty Removed the CPU fan and cleaned the heatsink. It was pretty dusty aswell. Damn these carpeted rooms. Now the main problem with this case is space vs features. I have 3 HD's, 1 DVD drive, 1 CD writer and now a 5.25"-size fan controller. With a fulltower that might be alright, but on a miditower that takes up alot of space, especially when the cables are in. Removed the floppy as I never use it anyway. The ideal situation would be to have a DVD writer that can read DVDs, CDs and also burn DVDs and CDs, and have the fancontroller built more compactly, which really shouldn't be a problem. I just didn't realize all this would take up so much space. This project has taught me alot. Yes, I know, that's one ugly sticker on that ugly Qtec PSU. Believe it or not I read the review on Bit-Tech before I bought it. If I had heard all these bad things about it I wouldn't have bought it. So the next best thing to buying a brand new one is, of course, to mod it. Eek, it's almost like inverted modding.. I'm taking out the rather nice looking fan from the PSU and replacing it with a boring black one :x There's a reason for that though. #1 you don't see the bottom fan on the PSu anyway, and #2 the black fan pushes more air. Time to get working on braiding the PSU. I have always heard how much time and effort this takes, and I have to agree. This took me AGES to do, must have been 7-8 hours. Main problem was shortening the cables for the motherboard. I didn't know how the pins on the motherboard connector looked, but I was pretty sure I didn't have any of them, nor did I have any knowledge about how to get the leads "connected" to the pin. So I did it the hard way. I cut them. Then soldered them back. This took me ages. I didn't think it would be that hard to get them soldered together, but I doubt I'll be doing that again any time soon. It always ended up in one big lump of solder and then didn't want to melt again. Gah. Anyway, I had put braiding on the little stump coming from the PSU and put some tape around it to hold it back while I was working. That sure was alot of work. Now to check and see that it reaches the motherboard Yay. I glued the braiding to the motherboard side of the cable. Looks really nice actually. No pics of that though. :/ A little break from the braiding was needed. Checked to see that the knobs would fit on the pots Cut the 5.25" cover for the fan controller and two switches controlling the air pump and the cathode throbber. Also cut 20 3mm holes for the HDD activity meter. They're not properly symmetric, just cut after the leds. I think I might have etched the PCB a little small or something, cause I couldn't get the holes symmetric and still fit with the leds. Ah well, it's pretty hard to notice anyway. I would have used a plain cover, but I only got one plain cover with the case, which was used for the fan controller. Arrghh, couldn't go without using my PC for this long. Had to take a break from the modding and use it. Hey, gave me time to test that the PSU was working properly anyway Found a use for that cathode inverter with the blue LEDs afterall There was no alternative floppy cover or anything, so I decided to light the hole up at least. Switches are installed, along with the fan controller (knobs on), HDD activity meter and UV cathode (mounted in top). Sorry, bad picture. As you can see the power cables have all been braided, I'm sorry about not making any pictures of doing that. It's a bit of a mess. I thought it would look alot cleaner, but it's just not possible with this amount of drives and a miditower. Installed the blue cathode in the back of the tower, connected to the cathode throbber which I placed behind the UV inverter, in the floppy slot. Ironicly, the blue cathode's inverter is mounted in the top of the case. The black rubber tops you see on the bottom is to hold the water tank in place. Luckily it doesn't look as messy from this angle That's the basic case done, two days before The Gathering And for the water tank.. You have to believe me when I say this, the effects looks alot better than this in real life. It's impossible to get a good picture though. On the other hand, I can get really fancy shots like this one: Ah, if only I could get that effect in real life So if you read the start of this post, you will know that "something went wrong". Well, it did I got to The Gathering, proud and ready to show off my machine. As I was filling the water tank, it started to leak. Shocked, I had to face that there was nothing I could do about it. I've come to the conclusion that the temprature changes might have done this to the poor tank. It left the warm and safe home at 22C and went out into a shocking -3C, and was left there overnight as we were driving for 8 hours. Then put into a warm home at around 20C. I guess this wasn't exactly optimal for the tank. So.. To sum up... The project is done. I'm not going to bother making another water tank for the case, and I don't think it's worth painting the metal chassis of this case. It's just not worth it. I've already got a bad ass urge to start modding again, but this time I want a fulltower with lots of room, and no premodded stuff to it. This case did turn out quite nice for a first time modder. I'm very satisfied with the overall look of the case, even though I could do it even better. I've already started planning another mod. Well, actually, two. I'm sure you will see another thread within a month or two by me where I introduce my next project. That is, if I can find a good fulltower. I'm having a hard time getting ahold of a fulltower that's not Chieftec/Antec. I guess I could use the Chieftec, but I would prefer a cheaper and plainer case, one of those old fulltower beige cases. Anyway, thanks for reading. I know it didn't really turn out to be very creative, and I didn't exactly do much mods to the actual case, but I did like the amount of custom electronics (well, custom in the sense that I didn't just buy it) that went into the project.
cool idea good work up till now you built your own water bublling effect rather than buying it from ...i think Lian Li did it once. looks good keep it up bye
Pent arbeid kammerat! digger boblene, men hvis det er vanntanken din vil du vel få luft i systemet? (in english: Nice work mate! I love the bubbles, but if it is your water tank, won't you have air bubbles in the systen? ) Keep up the good work!
<norwegian> Fint å se noen andre norske på bit-tech </norwegian> Yeah, if that was my water tank, it would You might notice I'm still on air cooling :/ The water tank is just eyecandy. Watercooling is going to be added to my NEXT system. This one is done, as I stated in my last post.
hehe I guess I'm just an VERY observant spectator but what about making the "eye-candy" larger, so it would fit the entire window? just a suggestion..
