Hey.. I recently stealthed my drives. The only thing that drives me nuts about it is i cant tell when my cd rom drive is being accessed and what not. So, now i want to hook up some blue led's to my cd-roms and mount them somewhere on my case so as these will display the cd-rom activity. My question is.. has anyone done this? Can anyone kind of point me in the right direction? I'm thinking it should be as easy as hooking up the led to where the old one would have gone and just add extention wires.. but the othe rthing is that my cd-roms are a cd burner and a dvd burner. both display different colors depending on what its doing via the LED. Does this mean it has a more complex hookup? any suggestions or comments are welcome. Thanks Asphix
I've replaced my LED's, the only thing you will have to look out for is to see if they are 5v or 3.3... Try the 5v first if they are too dimm put the 3.3v in. If you do it the other way round you will burn out the LED... My CD burner has two LED's, one for reading and one for writing. So I changed both to blue LED's. There shouldn't be any problem extending the wire, the only little problem I can see is, that if your wire is long it might add a little resistance, so your LED might dimm a little...........:cries: I'm sure Linear or cpemma will correct me if i'm wrong. They are to clever for my likeing. Only joking guys, I'm just jelous
If you have only one led it is a bi colour one. These give a different colour according to the electricity flow. As far as I knw they are only available in green/red. If you want different colours try hooking a set of fly leads and connecting your new leds one normally, and one back to front.
i will have to post pic when iu get home of me case to show you properly. on the left hand side of the case i've got 12 blue leds. first 5 are network card, 1 for cd rom 3 for cdrw (cd in / read / wright) 3 that i havn't used yet all you need to do is crack the case of teh cd rom, solder some wires, then run those wires to where ever you want the leds to go. oh, and put some kind of removeable join some where in the wire, other wise its v hard to move your network card to a differet pc
Must say impressive computers on this site, im pretty new to the whole computer moddin' but im hooked already, got some nice BIG extractor fans in my case, 150mm at front and 200mm at back and its pretty quiet. nice blue mettalic paint job if i say so myself ill get some pics sometime anyway..... Bi-coloured LEDs can also be green/yellow, they light up either colour due to the biasing of the diode. you can get LEDs which are tri-coloured red/green/yellow but the easiest and probably best option is to go with the fibre optics. what i dont get is a tri-colour LED can be bought cheaper than a plain blue one ?? weird -ƒlamika
keep the LEDs where they are and just get some fiber optic cable from mappers (stock code: XR56L) at £1.29 per metre, drill a little hole through your blanking plate at the psition of your drive leds, and put the cable through there....
Have a look at the led, if it's a 3-lead, the middle one will be common to both led colours. One problem is, it could be a common anode or a common cathode lead, but if you've a multimeter with a diode test position it will sort out what's what, and should light up the colour for each grouping. No problem extending the wires, the extra wire resistance is nothing compared to the existing led resistor value. If macroman's led drilling scares the poo out of you (does me), there are some "lighthouse" leds that will fit a tiny hole and I reckon are neat for panel indicators.
you could get two normal LEDs and connect them in reverse parrallel for a simple way to have one LED light at a time -ƒlamika
