Did the same thing as you with a tape deck mod. Mine isnt as much stealthed or anything you can tell it is a computer. ANyways the cool thing about the VU meter is that you can actually wire it to be the leds. I did that it looks awsome. Like when HD activity starts up it starts going up and down looks awsome. As you can see i kind of stoped working on it. Anyways GL,
Spent the weekend making the circuit boards to convert the hdd and dvd activity signals from digital to analogue so they could be connected to the VU meters (I'm told that if you just hook them up directly to a VU meter you risk damaging the needle from to high a signal). After discovering what each of the 3 legs on a potentiometer actually is and some shocking soldering skills on my behalf (might post pictures later, but my shockingly bad soldering skills isn't really that interesting), the left VU meter now displays the DVD activity and the right one displays the HDD activity . Now all that is left is to wire in some leds to a switch to light up the the VU meters, use the volume and bass/treble dials as fan controllers and wire up the audio ports to the sound card and it's finished.
Finished! I have finally gotten round to finishing this project off! Let's start off with a picture of the finished internals (with a better camera at last!) Yes, it's a mess in there, but space is tight and no-one will ever see the insides, so not too fused. I decided that I didn't want anything to be permenantly wired in because if anything died and needed replacing I didn't fancy desoldering and resoldering. For example: That's the circuit that converts the digital signal of the dvd activity led to an analogue signal for the volume metre. If I decide to change the dvd drive all I have to do is unplug it. Here it is the volume meter in action (this is the HDD one) Use your imgination to visualise the needle going crazy, looks pretty cool Of course, if I do decide to change the dvd drive, I'd still had to do some soldering for the remote led and eject switch. Which brings me on to: Pressing the "pause" button pushes up the white switch behind it. This ejects the dvd drive (as such ) Bits I didn't take pictures of - The 2 volume dials act as fan controllers (one for CPU, one for case). They are a bit strong, as if I turn the CPU fan down lower than 7 it stalls the fan! The 3 switches to the right of the tape deck (visible in the above picture). 2 of them turn led's on/off in the vu metres. Can't think what to make the third on do. I also managed to wire up the onboard sound to the front audio connector. That's pretty much it. Questions and comments welcome.
Hey Sicone, nice mod man! I am an audiophile myself and love this mod! I was wondering could you post the scematics for the circuit you used to control the vu meters? I have been looking all over the place for them and can't find them.
Damn, wish I'd seen this before. My dad had exactly the same tape deck, and it started chewing up tapes so was unusable. I never thought of modding it into a PC, I just destoyed it with a sledgehammer and an axe.
love the dvd stealth u have done a fantastic retro mod there, hope u do some more future projects. i like how u kept most of the original fuctions working as well as this can be hard to do when trying to do modding projects !!
