Project: Blade **PSOne LCD installed and operational**

No modding project is ever really finished. I've added a few things to Blade.

What are these ugly wires for?



Now they look better.



Should look good along with the painted and sleeved back USB ports.



Looks pretty good now! I like the extra height the feet give and the blue perfectly matches the fans.





I put the 3 way blue laser LED in the front of the case, just under the hard drives. It illuminates the vent holes in the lower front of the bezel. Looks better now from the front, well lit up. I also redid some of the wiring; only the wires to the HD's and CD drives are chrome sleeved (along with the IDE cables), the rest are black sleeved. I wanted to draw attention away from the black ones and towards the chrome ones and I think it looks better this way. I think I'm done now, at least until I think of something else to do.

 

awesome. very bloo! do you have individual controls for the lights so you can switch them off easily?

 

So blue...can't...close eyes...

*eyes melt*

THishg si loksing raly gud. Greatth works on thee sleaving. I needf bandlaids.

Oh, and

 

Munterofamodder: The cathodes are controlled by the rightmost knob on the Vantec fanbus. The feet can be turned off by a switch in the back in one of the PCI slots. The other 3 knobs on the fanbus control the fans, so if I wanted to turn all the fans off I can do that in a second. Basically, by turning off all the knobs on the fanbus and hitting the switch on the back, I can turn off all the lighting. Thanks for the comments guys!

 

UPDATE

Ever since I started work on this case, I'd been trying to decide what to do with the vent holes in the bottom of the front bezel. They didn't serve any purpose, and I was having a tough time finding a way to light them up properly to look good. Finally, it hit me: why even have the holes there at all? Might as well put something useful there.

I apologize for the somewhat crappy pictures, I have a cheapy digital camera and it doesn't take the greatest pictures.

I'm sure everyone who has fans in the side panel of their case can relate to how annoying it is to have the side panel tied to the case with the fan wires. I finally decided to put a stop to that, and ended up with this:



Each fan had two wires running from them, so I spliced in a 4 pin molex connector, sleeved the cables and painted the molex's black. Looks good, and now I can get the side panel off and out of the way when I'm working on it.

With much fear of cracking plexi, I took a jigsaw to the front bezel. After cutting, filing, wet sanding and polishing, and taking a jigsaw to the black metal under the plexi, I ended up with this:



That was a lot of work, but damn it looks good! This shot shows off how good the plexi looks after all the wet sanding and polishing:



You can see the pen clear as day through the hole I cut. That was a lot of work, but the hole looks like it was meant to be there; the edges are crystal clear.

I still had one more hole to cut, through the chassis. I don't have a dremel, and I didn't want to take everything out of my case to jigsaw it, so out came my trusty hand nibbler:



Anyone who's used one of these things knows that it's slow going, and can get pretty painful, but after about an hour of wrist breaking effort, I had this:



So why did I cut a hole in the front of my case? What's going in there?





If you don't have a free bay to mount an Aerogate 2, just make one! It looks great, and it's very functional. The wires that come with it are plenty long, so I had no problem hiding them in my case. You'd have to look very hard to even see any of the wires from it. I got it more for the thermal monitors than the fan controller, but I am running the CPU fan through it now, and the little HD fan that came with it. It's great being able to control the CPU fan without having to open the case. That leaves 2 fan channels open, but I don't need those with my Vantec controlling the 7 case fans and the 2 cathodes. I cut the hole in such a way that I don't even have to mount the Aerogate in the case; it's in there solid as a rock without having to bolt it down, which made things easier. I also mounted my 3 way blue LED behind the HD fan in the Aerogate to illuminate it; it lights it up a bit, but I might look for a better way to do it soon.

I think I've finally run out of ideas on this case...who am I kidding? I'm sure I'll think of something else soon!

 

Awesome work man, love your system.

 

looks great - incredible amount of bl00!
i don't think the case needs anything else doing to it.

 

Man, you read my mind, I was thinking, hmmm, if i had that case i'd do something to get rid of those vent holes in the bottom (useless features on cases are one of my computer pet peeves), and what do i find on page 5 but, bam, no more vent holes! you ROCK! excellent job on the sleeving and cable management too btw.

 

Nice work! Good job with the plexi and way to, uh, not crack it

Nice sleeving job too.

 

damn thats ingenious.... LOVE the areogate on the bottom... great way to get rid of pointless vent holes...

love it

 

I just couldn't leave well enough alone! I bought a PSOne LCD off Ebay for a good price, and proceeded to hack it up. I didn't have any room in the front of the case to mount it due to the large controller this thing uses, so my only mounting option was in the window. This turned out really well since I can see it really easily from there.

I don't have a before picture, but I'm sure you've all seen these things. I broke off all the lower plastic parts and just left myself with the round casing for the screen and the controller. After a few coats of Krylon Fusion and sleeving the little cables that come out the bottom, I had this:



Whew, it still works You might notice I am using S-Video - I don't have any soldering ability whatsoever and it's just too much work and danger to the screen for me to try getting it working with VGA (plus I'd need another PCI video card with CSYNC just to run it). S-Video looks pretty good to me anyway - I'm happy with it.

I got lucky and picked up one of the cigarette adapters for this really cheap. I hacked the cigarette adapter end off of it and spliced a molex on so it's now powered internally by the power supply. I managed to cram the block for the adapter behind my drive bays. I have so much stuff crammed behind my motherboard tray and drive bays that it now takes 5 minutes to get the side door on, but it's worth it for a neat wiring job.

I mounted it to the outside of the drive cages. It's easily visible from there. Here are some pics of the final setup. Note that my camera is pretty crappy, and it looks WAY better in real life.



This was the best dark shot I could get of it. You can't see what's on the screen but at least you get an idea of what I'm looking at most of the time. I had to put the flash on to actually get a picture of what the screen displays.



Looks good playing from my TV card!



Decent 3/4 shot of the entire case. You can see my Samurize config running, which is usually what I have going on it when I'm not watching TV.



Close up of my Samurize config running on it. The picture's a bit blurry, but it looks perfectly clear in reality.

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Thanks to everyone in the forum who has ever posted about a PSOne screen - I read everything here I could find about it. You guys rock!

 

what software is that? The one you are using to display stuff on your lcd?

Can you link me?

 

www.samurize.com

Very cool software, but it takes some work to get it configured the way you want.

 

thanks

I see it now.

I want to use it on my project.
Project hydro voyager has a lcd in it as well but mutch smaller than yours. its 2.5inch type and I will hook it to the tv output as well.


Thanks again.

and sorry for pluging my project in.

 

Looking nice, I like the way you tryed to integrate the screen. The reflections on the screen would bug me to no end but it looks good...

 

Thanks my58vw, I'm a big fan of your Divergence project. There are actually no reflections on the screen when I use the LCD. It might appear that way in the photos (like I said I have a crappy camera). I would have liked to put the LCD in the front of the tower but I was limited by the size of the case. I like the screen where it is anyway, I can see it more easily than if it was in the front.

Did you find that when you used S-Video with your PSOne screen that the image didn't fill the entire screen? The only thing that bugs me about the screen is that I have a 1/4 inch black band around the entire outside of the screen. I've tried using the driver controls and Powerstrip to increase the image size but it just won't do it. When you use VGA, does it fill the entire screen? If it did, it might motivate me to break out a soldering iron and go for the VGA mod, but I shudder to think of how that might turn out I've never used one before.

 

How does the S-Video mod work? You plug the S-Video side into your videocard, and then plug the other side into the rectangular port on the lcd? Anyone have pictures of the port?

 

Dammit I only just spotted this thread And I thought I had come up with a unique name. I googled and everything.

Anyway, sweet looking mod dude. I just wish those damn PSOne LCD's were easier to find over here.

 

Hey Mega, I'm totally useless when it comes to electronics. Mind making a quick and easy guide to making the car adapter/s-video work with the LCD? I'm a bit confused, I've seen PSOne LCD car adapters that just have the end (to the LCD), and the car adapter end. But the offical Sony one has a big bulky adapter block in the middle of them both! Any explaination for this...? Does the Sony one work and the others do not?

Thanks!

 

Hi BakedGoods,

I'm useless with electronics too, so read this thread:

edit: oops, wrong thread! This is the right one:

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=62664

I got a lot of good help from others here when I modded the adapter and this thread explains it all. I have no idea if other adapters would work - I used the Sony one. I would imagine it would work fine as long as it's converting to 7.5 volts from 12 volts.