That would not be hard to do but might not be a good idea to include. Taken from my Truespace model. Lower inside approx 47.5x30.5x13cm Upper inside approx 18.701x12.0x2.6cm Outside 20.5x14x9 inches. Anyways update time. the CD drive. What I have to deal with. This will need to be removed. Along with this. This was as far as I had gotten on this while I waited for a chance for Zapwizard to cut a few things for me. The lid. The base. A little something for the drive to rest on and maybe help keep some vibration out. The drive installed. Unfortunately the epoxy I used to hold the hinges onto the Lucite did not hold well so the lid is just resting on top of the base. The tray closed switch removed then wire attached to the pads and run out the back. The eject switch soldered onto and run to the back. There was a plate on the back side that kept me from soldering directly onto the board so I used the switch’s board. Under the tray and faraway to grandma’s house we go... Yes you can still open the tray the old fashion way. For a while I had been using a pair of toggle switches to eject the drive. Flipping one then the other to get an idea for what would be needed. After playing with the drive I found out that I still need the eject button, other wise the operating system will not notice that the disk has been removed. So after a few weeks thinking about this I remembered a part of a circuit that Zapwizard had used on one of his car circuits. SW1 is for the eject button and SW2 is the drive tray. When the lid is closed the micro switch powers the relay attached to SW2. When the lid is opened the micro switch charges the 1000uf cap under the SW1 relay. The current of this activates the relay closing sw1. When the cap is charged the relay releases. During this time the SW2 relay is being held with the remaining charge in the 3300uf cap. SW1 should remain closed for about 1 second and SW2 should open shortly after this. The resistor across the 1000uf cap drains the charge to reset the circuit when the lid is closed again. Testing the circuit. So far so good. Free forming the device. You can see the reed switches that go inside the relays. With the reeds installed this gives me my mounting points for the switch wires. There are 3 leads on the top. SW1 not shown really well SW2 is the longer one and the ground is on the outside. I used a wire wrapping tool to attach everything. For TXGF I had hot glued the hinges back onto the lid so it would be somewhat functional.
Skinning the faceplate! Cutting the material for the faceplate with a nibbler is sloooow.. So I went to Wal-Mart and got myself a metal sniper. I also found out that you can do curved cuts with these too. The fan hole I made using the metal snips had a few sharp edges. i fixed this with a file to remove most of the sharp pointy things. --------------------------------------- I used connecter sealant (RadioShack part number 278-1645. Great stuff.) to hold the panels in place. This allows easy removal and some vibration canceling. Hot glue was used to attach the keyboard mouse connecter. The network plug did not want to stay with hot glue. I think a wire wrapped around might change this. The network plug did not want to stay with hot glue. I think a wire wrapped around might change this. I need to recut this piece. The sound board had a bit better luck with hot glue. There should be a fan here but installation of the fan in this spot proved too difficult than what it was worth. I will fix this soon by cutting more out of the faceplate frame and letting the panel go into this spot. To dos! There is a bolt missing from the flat panel frame. I found the nut for it but the bolt is missing in action... I will get to replacing this and rebuilding the entire frame after my fiancé goes back to school. (Taking that apart is almost an all day job!) I also need to do something to make this look a bit nicer. Questions and or comments are welcomed.
very nice work, but the top looks very hastily put together. i thought of an idea for cooling with a fan, but unfortuneatly it might be a little to late to implement into this case. Ok, so what you do it place a fan on a hinge, so it can move from 0 to 90 degrees. on the left side which would be the inlet or even outlet side, you attach a piece of aluminum flexible ducting (what you see behind a dryer). have this just long enough so you cannot see the end of it outside the case. you can lift it up or just leave it flat, just an idea though. So far great design and implementation.!
Looks to me like it has an IDE and a molex connector so it would work with a non-laptop motherboard. I may be wrong but thats what it looks like.
