Case Mod - In Progress Felix: Old Soviet computer

It looks amazing.

 

this looks amazing, would love to do one based on aircraft parts

 

So sexy.

 

Break-time is up.

 

Yup. Get back to work, slacker!

 

Looking great

I was thinking the same about your log Nexxo

 

Oh god. I had almost forgotten about this awesome mod. Good thing Cheapskate is there to bump it for me

 

well there are a couple of builds that needs to get going again soon.
this one for sure, and then i'm looking at you, Nexxo

 

In Soviet Russia work gets back at you!

Well, I'm not an adherent of compulsory labour, so I have temporarily suspended work. Not so much left to do: I have to add LED lighting to the gauges and to move the panel to another identical chassis where my main computer is placed now. It is not ready for this yet

But not working specifically on this project does not mean not doing any modding at all. In parallel, I started to make new custom PC that may seem interesting to you. But I will show it later, when there will be some progress. Now it mainly exists in the form of drawings.

 

Warm white LEDs please. And test them first --not all 2700K LEDs are created equal. Some seem too cold --more like 3000K.

 

Aye, aye, sir!

Actually I was thinking not about white, but about yellow LEDs. I've seen them in comparison and I think that even the most warm white LEDs are too cold. Once I've already used yellow LEDs in similar project:



I liked the color, but I didn't like the separate light spots that they make (even though I used mirror tinfoil and scatterer). Also when I looked at PC from top, the LEDs became visible. So now I want to use very small SMD LEDs and place them on the top of a gauge frame. Unfortunately, there is no enough narrow LED stripes in sale, so I have to make it myself. I already tried and got an acceptable result, but the design was unpractical. It didn't pay any attention to insulation. Maybe I'll put my self-made stripes into thin transparent PVC pipes.

 

The right warm white LEDs look pretty convincing (I'm pretty obsessive about that stuff) but the problem is that what is sold as 2700K "warm white" LEDs can vary greatly in colour temperature. They can range from having a warm yellow hue to faintly yellow-green, to faintly orange to just stark white. Examples here.

You can buy warm white LEDs designed to light up model train carriages that look like little fluorescent tubes (48mm long though]:



Find them here.

EDIT:

Come to think of it, you could just buy a LED filament bulb and just take out the individual filaments (available in varying length, usually about 28mm long, and 1 to 2mm thick) and use those. Being essentially an array of teeny-tiny LEDs soldered to a wire and coated in a phosphorus substrate, they work just like any other LED and emit a warm light reminiscent of incandescent filaments: 2200K, perfect! They are dimmable. You can even buy the filaments as separate components on eBay. Because each filament basically consists of about 20 tiny LEDs connected in series, they need a bit higher voltage. But because you don't want to drive them at full brightness anyway, 12V may be enough.



Youtube video:

 

very very very cool.

 

Just the right amount of perfect.

 

Good news everyone! I'm back to work. In the last two days I've replaced some temporary elements with permanent, fixed a couple of issues with wiring and prepared all the gauges for installation of backlight. Advice about LED filament bulb is interesting, but such elements are suitable only for rectangular gauge. They will not fit in rounded ones. So I'm going to make some experiments with conventional and SMD LEDs.

 

You can bend the filaments, although not very much. SMD LEDs embedded in a shaped opaque plastic light guide may be a more elegant solution. I use them in the levers of Ada.

 

I'm ready to show you the first results of my experiments with LEDs.

In the old version of the backlight I installed 2–4 large LEDs under the scaleplate.



But the gauge with this kind of backlight looks good only from the front, but if you gaze from above, the LEDs will shine right in your eyes. In addition, they make shadows and form distinct light spots.

Once I tried to make my own LED stripe and purchased tiny SMD LEDs sized 1.6 × 0.8 mm. With enormous efforts I placed 12 of them on thin wires using a standard soldering iron, but the structure has turned to be unreliable and impractical.

But only a few days ago I've got a brain-wave that at least half of my gauges have a gap between the scaleplate and the body, so LEDs can be placed behind!



It solves several problems: firstly, LEDs can not be seen from any angle; secondly, the size of the gap between the scale and the glass no longer plays a role, so I can use big ultra-bright LEDs.

But, in turn, it also created new difficulties. I had to direct the light in such a way that a substantial part of it could highlight the scaleplate. To do it, I painted the insides of the gauge white and glued a stripe of masking tape.



Location of the LEDs and their inclination angles were chosen empirically. I placed them under the arched reflector tinfoil. It prevents the bottom of the gauge from overlighting and returns the light to the top.



I have puzzled for a long time what it reminds me of, and finally realized:



I really liked the result. Even from the top the scaleplate looks uniformly illuminated. Earlier I could only dream of it.



If you take a side view, you can see the bright strip of masking tape, but the LEDs themselves are not visible.

 

Excellent result!

 

Great work!! So glad this thread is back in action!

 

Looking good