Hi Chaps, I'm working on a custom project and for it I'm using a laptop's motherboard which is essentially mounted in a wooden box instead of the laptop's original casing. Though I was wondering... should I be concerned with anything like shielding or grounding? How is a laptop grounded anyway? Is it worth lining the box with sheet metal or would that be pointless? Cheers for the help!
A motherboards grounded by the PSU, normaly you should have no problems asfar as grounding goes. Shielding is something different though, the shielding from magnetic interference comes from the pc case, the magnetic rays are blocked by the case. You should just ask yourself if you have some realy strong magnets near (closer than 30-50 cm) your laptop, like a sub-woofer. Hope that helps!
Cheers! I wasn't sure of the purpose of the metal sheeting inside of the original laptop casing... thought it could have been either protection against static, a heat spreader, or magnetic shielding... pain that it turns out to be magnetic sheilding since that means I can't use all this lovely brass sheeting I have lying around Though it isn't likely to be anywhere near a strong magnetic field to be honest... I am more concerned about the potential damage from static So laptop motherboards are grounded through the dc inverter? Does that mean if I use the original inverter there isn't any real threat from static?
Its very likely the metal is also used for heat conducting, I'm not sure though If you want to use that brass you still could, Brass is an alloy of copper and zink. [Theorie hat on] Copper itself is a very very bad magnetic conductor but zink isn't, if you concider that most brass is has somewhere between 10 to 45% zink it still isn't a very good magnetic conductor. If you're still worried about static electricity then you could just ground the sheet. Now I'm not sure if you can just connect the ground wire from your laptop PSU to the sheet, or if that will cause some problems. Probebly not though.
