Project :blingGreen(04/03/2005 - MaximumPC's June issue! Rig of the Month!!!)

Excellent work mate looks brilliant so far.

Stu

 

Thanks guys!
3 quick pics of the wire harness. 2 levels are done, I cut the 3 layer tonight... but I can feel myself getting sick again, so I'm calling it a night.

Please enjoy the pics and I'll likely have some before and after pics to post up later this weekend after I put the harness into my PC!

Also, to reduce the clutter, I'm going to pull the UV Rounded IDE cables. Too much bulk.
I'll be replacing them with the black, flat ribbons that came with the Asus board. I think I can stealth these pretty well, to where the primary visible items are the power cables, and that it not lost in the cables!











More soon! I'm off to bed!

 

bling... layeth the smack....DOWN!!!!

So... the last few days have seen me coughing up a lung, wife begging me to come to bed... But "Noooo..." I say... I need to keep my milestones of progress so that I can migrate to newer, faster hardware! (If I put it in now... I might as well kiss off modding, cuz I'm a gonna be playin on the hardware and not werkin on the harware! )

So, my wire harness that I have been babbling about for the last few days...
Here are some before pics of the cable clutter:


Not very pretty....


Not very pretty at all....

Give em a good tug/pull/rip:


MWAHAHAHAAHAAAAA!!!!! Guts splayed out for all to see.... "Freeee-duuuuuuuuhm!!!" (Thank you Mel, )



So, I've now made the insides nice and quick for the air flow! But, blast it all... I still need the power back... and, "Oh yeah!" needed to put my 92 mm exhaust back on. I took it off during this fray to mod it a bit too. I added 3 5mm UV LED's to the fan by tapping holes in the fan frame so that the LED's would fire in a triangular pattern. I then sanded the crap out of the sides of the LED ( to make the light disperse) and then sanded down the top of the LED to a angle so that I could fit the LED's in without having the fan blade hit them. I am pulling their power from the +12 lead on the fan header, grounding the same way, vias the header. I then wrapped my cables in black sleeving , to minimize the signature, and *hide* it while the lights were out.



Fan mounted, harness in place!


Another look at the goodness... (I need to do some more IDE cable tweaking, no worries there. This was to get the harness and the fan back into play...)



3/4's... from the rear. Looking mighty fine, if I may say so!

So... I tell myself, "Self! Turn out those damn lights!"
*click*

"Mmmmmm.... tasty!"



Another 3/4 back end shot... still looking good!


Looking up towards the top of the case, power supply, 2 case fans, ambient light from the top flame window is the backgrounding behind the power cables.





I Wanna thank Captain Sluggo for fielding all of my inane questions while I worked on this section of the mod. His work on mk.V was truly inspirational! I hope I have performed a bit of variation worthy of his ideas. I'm going to buy a drill press later on, so my holes are not as spot on as his were, but they are close enough!

Next stop, my lighting circuit!


I cannot wait to get that in play and working!
Soooo... what cha' think?

 

Working the flame lighting

I'm trying out some methods to help illuminate my flames more consistantly,

I'm starting with these LED's mounted directly to the door. 6-5mm UV LED's.

Here is the progression...

Please remember, that this is just the preliminary lighting... I have layers to be added to fill in the weak spots.... <grin>

Here we are looking at the 2 loops of UV LED's and the cut blue acrylic flames...


The LED's glued down into their final places after some experimentation...


I then performed some minor directional tweaking to get them lighting up the parts of the flame that I wanted... and then I stood it up, turned out the lights and let her rip!

The reflection about 1/2 way down was a canned air can that I was using to support the standing... little bit distracting...


So I figured out how to make it stand without the can...


Again... this is just preliminary. I have many other LED's that I will be putting in to add in some color and depth to the flames...

More later!

 

Very nice.. I like the contrast.. Now that you are giving lighting a bigger theme in the project are you going to replace the velvet in the bottom of the machine with something that looks better under the lights.

 

Thanks!

I'm considering pulling it tight. I like the material, and I like hte patterning on it... so it will not leave... but it *may* change!

I stumbled into a compatable 4 inch UV CCFL the other day... I'm going to try to find a way of getting it "suspended" in the middle of the case. I have a few ideas on how I can best achieve this, just dont know if the lines are long enough... we'll see. I want it to be in the space to the right of the CPU, in that dark spot...

Went through my LED's and looked at the difference between 5mm and 3mm and, wow! You just dont think that the size difference is just that big... but it is! Going to do some light tests tonight, I hope, to see how the various LED's will project to the flames and in various places around the motherboard.

Fingers Crossed!

 

Just a quick verbal update,

Last night, I created single LED light samples for all of the colors and sizes that I have.

Red
Auburn
Blue
Green
Orange
UV

The Red and Orange and Auburn are going to work out very well on the flames! They pass thru the blue acrylic with a really nice color!

The UV/Blue/Green look great as well! I have ideas for accents for those choices as well!
(love the green... wow!)

More pics later!

 

Chipset and Heatsink mods...

Ok, I've been busting a hump to get this thing done by this weekend (ATi Ultimate LAN happening, click here... ) so I'm going to be making periodic updates this week as I progress thru all of the various mods, instead of a massive update.

So, as such, here are my preliminary mods:

Chipset cooler, with the light off:



*clap* *clap*



Mosfet cooler, light off:


All I wanted to do here was to illuminate the ASUS logo on the heatsink, and I'm hoping that it blends well with the CPU Heatsink effects.



Here is the CPU heatsink work that I have started:



I took the LED's and nestled them into the shroud of the sink:


Now... test the LED's to make sure I did not break anything:


BLAST OFF!!!



These are the static images of the LED's. I've finished building the circuit board, however I have not tested it yet.

What this circuit board will allow me to do is take the Hard Drive activity and spread it out amongst all of my LED's. The CPU has 4 LED's that will be flickering (diagnoal 2 on, 2 off) with the HD activity, and the green LED's will also strobe with the HD activity.

I'm getting ready to build the LED holder for the flames alternate colors/flickering effect, and those will be tied into the same controller so that different colors will be on/off or off/on depending on the activity state.



What ya think?

 

Lots of Bling... Thats what I am talking about.. Mod On wit ya bad self.

 

Thanks TheDon!
Appreciate the support!

Put the heatsink on the mobo, plugged everything up and it looked good! ...

except that one of the green LED's went out!

It is a line of 3 LED's in Series... so how does the circuit continue working if one of the bulbs has ceased to operate? Wouldn't that break the circuit?

Wierd...

I've got a mystery on my hands!

I also had to re-bondo/sand/glaze putty/sand/primer the bottom of the flame window. One of the holes that I'd bondo'd shut, at the top of the window decided to eject it's bondo treatment during one of the cold snaps we had a few weeks ago. Repaired now... but there is a little bit of final sanding, one more layer of primer, then a couple coats of paint and the window should be as good as new.

If anyone can explain to me "why?" the first LED in a series stopped functioning while leaving the other two working, I'd appreciate it!

More tomorrow!

 

Sounds like the actual led when it burned out it shorted itself or you shorted it and thus continuing the circuit.

 

We did some testing with the meter and the LED has some really odd qualities, but suffice it to say... the LED was bad. I'll have to either:
a) Find a replacement 3.3v green LED
b) Find a replacement using a complimentary color.
c) use a 5mm blue LED and sand the crap out of it!

I dunno... but I'll need to have it figured out quicklike!

 

WOO HOOO!!!!

Finally got my activity circuit working! My boss went after it with a multimeter and found that the ground trace was incomplete. Once we ran it to where it needed to be, the thang started strobing!!!

YEAH BAYBEEE!

That means that tonight I finish soldering up my LED light strings in series, get them located and aimed properly, secured and ready to go!

I've also put the clear window back into the side panel, and today, before leaving for work, I plopped on the blue flame accent backing. Should be dry by the time I get home!

Test mount the window on the case to see LED clearance on the sides, and then make a decision on where to mount the accent LED's for best color display.

WOOHOO!!!! Loving life right now! I was seriously sweating this circuit! It is a rather critical component of the whole mod... and now it is tested and working! Thanks cpemma for the circuit suggestion!

I'll have pics and hopefully a little .mov file by tomorrow!
I'll be moddin most all night tonight!

 

MORE!!!

 

I'm glad you were able to overcome your issue. I will be drinking for most of tonight so while downing a few I will think of you........ Well maybe not that much.. Cheers..

 

Well... I got all 16 lines soldered to the PCB (8 lines to carry LED's in series, 2 legs each), and then I got 3 LED chains completed on them. I have 2 chains on the board (2 series lines to the CPU Heatsink), so I have basically got 5 of the 8 lanes completed. I'll wire up the other 3 lanes tonight, and get the motherboard and the circuit board into the PC!

I also stripped out my old motherboard and components from bling in preparation for the new move in! I took a few pics last night... but by the time I wrapped up, I was too exhausted to post... my eyes look like Road Maps right now...

In the home stretch now! I have less than 24 hours to finish the mod, and I have the end in sight!

 

I'M DONE! ¡Me acaban! Je suis fini! Ich werde beendet!

YAY!!!!!
One full "all nighter" (Friday to Saturday) to get it ready for TXGF/ATi Ultimate LAN here in Dallas... 2 hours of sleep, and a 12 hour testing blitz of gaming and stuff... wow!

Been a long time since I pulled an All Nighter!


But anyway, on with the pics!!

Here is the new mobo/proc with the LED controller attached as well as the other LED lines to be routed.



A close up of the LED bundles...



New mobo/proc/RAM and the LED's in their preliminary locations:



Fired up the first time:


Came home from the LAN, finally got some sleep last night... woke up this morning and realized I did not have any pics of the case completely together!



Lights off, no flash:





I like this pic alot... captures much of the flame coloring that I was trying to create:


I've taken a movie of the drive activity reflected in the LED's, I just need to chop it down a bit, and I'll post it up!

I appreciate eveyone's patience and inspiration while I muddled through this, my first "personal" mod (My previous one was for a neighbor, and I did not have the time to do eveything that I wanted to it, nor the budget.)

I'm happy with this! Just some minor LED aiming tweaks and some diagnositcs on some of the LED circuits, but other than that this is completed!

I'll post up the .mov file when I have it finished! Anyone know of a good free app that I can used to edit and save existing .MOV files?

Thanks again all!

 

Outstanding Tech! Looks great, I love the way you wheren't afraid to use more than one colour in your scheme! The world doesn't not live by blue alone! The plexi flames behind the flames in the window cut out look really good.

 

Congratulations !

Nice mod !

But you should say "J'ai fini" instead of "Je suis fini"... "Je suis fini" is closer to "I'm dead" than "I'm done"

 

Hehehe... that's what I get for using the Google "Translate" function!


I am a bilingual illiterate!

Thanks for the comments guys!
I'm really happy how it came out, with the colors and all.