How's your project coming on? Any updates yet? I've started mine but i've got no digi camera, so sorry no pics. It's all up and running. Motherboard is in HD fitted to lid all holes cut. intake and outtake holes cut for fans. PSU fitted. Made some custom Fan grills to cover the holes. All i have to do now is fit a CD-rom, not sure if i'm putting one in yet. And i've also yet to get power and reset buttons fitted. And a couple of blue or white LED's. *Edit Have you done any blowholes yet? I've had to make custom fan grills to cover mine, not to neat*
Funny you should ask because..... Its Update Time Well after recieving some nice goodies from ebuyer and chill-tek I managed to do some more work on my project. Lets start with what I bought A couple of standard-ish fan grills. Move along nothing to be seen here... 2 80mm Alu framed Evercool fans. Mmmmmm, shame the blades aren't alu too. 1 Green cathode. Glowy isnt it... Now I had some new bits it was time for a little modding. I drilled a couple of holes in my fan controller board and mounted it to the side of the case by the power supply. The HS on the LM317 should get some nice cool air from the intake. Missing from this pic is the 7805 I added to get a nice 5V to run the fans from as well I heatshrink sleeved all the I/O cables in bottom corner, notice I now have a USB header in there too Here are the USB ports from the outside and with a USB flash disk in one of them So then using my trusty 79mm hole saw I cut 2 holes, one over the PSU (Intake) and one in the opposite corner (Exhaust) Installed the fans with some special screws (read down for more info). I may decide to do something about the white plastic showing on the exhaust fan Here a close-up on one of the fans. I used slotted screws to attach them with... A counter-sunk M4 nut on the other side. I had to drill the fans out to do this. Drilled out to 5mm for the screw and 8mm (I think) to countersink the nut. Heres the cathode installed in the case. Ive attached it with double sided sticky pads. Maybe not firm enough to go Lan partying but this aint gonna move once finished In this pic the fans are connected to the motherboard headers. Once I have wired the fans into the controller only the RPM wire will go back to the motherboard. Flat toggle switch to turn the cathode on/off. I had a wierd problem where turning the cathode on would reset the PC ! I found that it was causing a initial drain on the 12V crashing the mobo. So I changed the 1000uF cappy between the 12V and 0V on the PSU for a 4700uF. This cured the problem. And finally a pic showing the effect of the cathode on the shiny fans. I decided to go with a cathode and shiny fans rather than LED fans since I wanted the metal look when the 'case lights' were off, but some nice colours when they were on. This pic is taken in average light so darkness should make this effect better Whats left to do ? Well an LCD, wiring the fans up, installing the fan voltage meter plus a few other finishing touches. Comments ?
Yeah! Comments alright....I hate you...... Only kidding, yours looks way cooler than mine.. I like the look of the Alu fans. I've got one fan Dead centre of my case. And my exaust fan is my PSU fan. I will have to monitor the temps to see if it's ok. Looking real nice...Not sure what colour cathode to go with I've got 2 blue LEDed Fans wired upto mine, so far. Keep up the good work....
I like the looks of the green light coming out of the fans. Psst! I like your fan grills much more than those pesky "biohazard" ones.
Hey Hippo, You wont belive this but I have built a complete PC into one of those cheapo cases..Erm - last week infact Has VGA LCD, CDWriter,HD, floppy Full size Powersupply....... Looks nowhere near as good as yours tho - Functionality was my goal. Main purpose of my build was because I cant afford a laptop & laptops are damm expensive, if possible to upgrade !! Will post some piccys of it for you lot to laught at
Its Update Time ! Well Ive been kinda busy so I hadnt done much work on the case for a while, but I managed to do a bit and here in pictoral form are the results. I apologise for the quality of some of the pics. The light in the room was a bit wierd when I took the pics and the flash didnt turn on I've had to tweak them a little to get them acceptable. So I got round to wiring up a 2 x 16 LCD. I wired directly to a connector that would plug into the mobo header. The Ribbon cable I used has been covered with sleeving. On the back of the LCD is a pot for contrast and a 2 way terminal block so I can connect 5V/0V from the power supply. Holes cut out ready for the LCD and the panel meter which will measure the voltage applied to the fans. LCD and spare panel meter installed, just testing the fit I decided that my hole cutting for the LCD and the panel meter was a little rough and I needed to do something about it. I decided to create a front bezel for the display but couldnt decide what to create it from. I had thought about perspex painted black from the other side, but it didnt look right. Aluminium may have looked right but I couldnt be sure that I would get the cut right. Then I had a brain storm. Remember the stuff I used in beige-be-gone well I had some of it left. Instead of using the shiney side I had the duller side showing. Heres what it looks like now, I pritty pleased with the effect. Not much left to do now, should be finished soon Comments ?
I like it. Where did you get that Aluminium stuff from... Me wants some. I think it's turned out really well....it
Its stuff they had left over at work from an old product. I used a lot of it in my old project beige-be-gone. Its a thin clear plastic with a foil coating on one side. I used the none foil side for the bezel.
Well I finished the Project today, installed all the software and everything works Now I could have taken loads of pictures of the final thing, but you've already seen those so just the next two should be enough. and Another Project finished. Im Happy with the way it turned out, it performs its function well and looks good Hope you enjoyed reading this project as much as I enjoyed making it.
