Case Mod - In Progress Project: Orange Monster, 2006-07-26; Arts & crafts 2025-02-23

Female solder to the board- type connectors nested in the print. The tricky bit would be the act of soldering and getting the wires together in the print body. Solid wire would work best. A bit of epoxy to keep the connector in?
Some madman here once made an individual wire + water channel manifold. I wish I could remember who.

 

@Cheapskate Ha, I wonder who it was

I think it's possible to just run the wires and design a "housing" for the JST-female/male connector set where the wire can just be pushed in. With this system I'm not going to actually "encase" the wires in the print, but design it so that there is a friction fit between the block and the wire. And same would go for the JST-plug section with perhaps some CA-glue or epoxy if needed.

I'll design & print some sort of prototype before jumping in fully to the design process.

And I better come up with something sexy seeing as we just got to page 69

 

Tool wall update

Just a quick update about the tool wall project which is somewhat adjacent to the Orange Monster, both timewise & themewise:



Decent progress, but still some real estate to fill in the middle



And yes, I do plan on installing a sturdy shelf above the tool wall with integrated lighting & UV led strip

Off to the shop for a change to continue the actual project...

 

Neat, but I'll stick to my perforated frying pan rack. The base doubles as a junk screw depository.

 

Arts & crafts

A very small update for today. I had a busy week and the time I had I spent pretty much looking at the monster and doing some arts & crafts...



I took some pens & A3-sized paper and started scribbling "a wiring diagram" for the damn thing. Mind you, these are only the wires that are going to the Aquaero. And no, it's not in proportion, but this was kinda fun and much quicker than drawing the case in cad. A 3D scanner could be beneficial for this kind of thing, but I'm not going to invest in one just for this project

The only exception is the power button / power led wires that are going to the motherboard, but they cross paths with other wires in the picture, so they're in there just for that. Also the power button wires & led wiring for the reservoir & front accent piece are drawn outside the case just for clarity.



The only actual progress was made with the wiring of the flow meter. I didn't like the the plug and I didn't have the official cable, so I modified the plug itself and bent the connectors 90 degrees towards the front of the case.

After that I soldered three wires straight to the connectors and it wouldn't be me if I didn't stuff it up at least once, so I cut the wires too short and had to re-do the soldering



This cable will be under everything and it's about 4cm long, so I didn't even consider sleeving it, but luckily I got the good stuff from Nils, so I covered everything in heatshrink.

There are a lot of questionmarks still in the air. Will the Aquaero work, will the flow meter work, did I connect it correctly etc. etc.

That's about it for now. Next up will be extending the fan wires, designing the wiring blocks with JST-plugs embedded in them and slowly work the wires up to the Aquaero.