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Loading ...Sound, Lights and Speakers
me2k
Progress on the Bricktop is slow, (mainly due to saving up for the screen) but I have churned out some of the finer details.
The Power panel consists of the: power switch, the reset switch, IDE LED and the power LED. The switches are a pair of salvaged tact switches from a remote controled car and the LEDs are salvaged from the same case the mother board tray came from. The panel is made from is 1.5mm carbon fiber. The silver button you see is a piece of 6mm aluminium rod made smooth with wet and dry paper. I found that the switches failed to work when testing the panel, but they work now. The reason they didn’t work was due to the switch having four pins where direct opposites made a solid connection and diagonals as well as side by side pins made the switch work. I had wired direct opposites to test this thinking the wiring was the same as a normal switch Lesson learned.
Tact switch pin out
The Amplifier
I resurrected the amplifier and speakers from a relatively new flat screen TV ironically a 20″ screen and a good make (Sony) which had been in the possession of my friend and the screen met a fatal end as most flat screens do a big crack across the diagonal. But back to the sound system, the speakers are of a reasonable quality and being the oblong shape they are made them perfect however the speakers have powerful magnets around them that would damage any hard disk placed near the. The amplifier was salvaged from the same TV it came as part of the power supply board with some hacking here and there I was able to separate the board from the power supply. The amp circuit will run off the laptops power supply as it runs on 12 volts DC and 5 volts DC which is supplied by the molex connector. The amp circuit works but with one small draw back, the volume control doesn’t work, but I hope to get it working soon (may just require a resistor).
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Loading ...The Bumper
me2k
he front curved edge of the Bricktop, nicknamed the “bumper” is made from a 470mm piece of drain pipe cut length ways. The only problem with the drain pipe is its made from µ-PVC; which happens to be a positive conductor of static electricity and when rubbed it stores a static charge. To solve this problem I will be connecting a bare unpainted part of the pipe to the ground pin on the back of the power supply. Here are some build pictures for the front “bumper”. To gain a straight line on the pipe I placed a piece of Right angled aluminium along the pipe.
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Loading ...The Hinge
me2k
The hinge is easy to make, but the tricky part is getting the screen to stay up right and open. I plan to use a large screw and two toothed washers for each hinge. The monitor wires will be external and wrapped in braiding instead of concealing the wires in side the hinge like modern laptops.
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Loading ...The Design
me2k
Here are some design pictures from sketch-up, the rear of the screen is likely to change depending on the size of the LCD driver circuit. You can see why I have called this mod “The Bricktop” as it is quite thick due to the use of a full size graphics card. I have opted to remove the battery since this laptop is not going to be efficient enough to use one for more than 30 minutes. To flatten the graphics card and the possible W-LAN card (hopefully a wireless N card) I will be using a riser card that points an agp and a pci slot at right angles and as the name suggests lifts the slot up of the mother board and gives clearance for the graphics card fan.
Rated: 40% (5 votes)
Loading ...The Beginning
me2k
The beginning
This is my first mod and I have to admit it is very ambitious, but i will continue to complete it. As the name suggests the mod is going to be a laptop; made using an atx motherboard and a 20″ screen as portability is not an issue for me as i don’t mind how big the brick gets.
The spec. is as follows: A-bit AV8 3rd eye motherboard, socket 939 AMD athlon 64 3500+, nvidia geforce 7800 G, 1GB ram, 160GB laptop hard drive, slot loading slim dvd drive, 20″ acer LCD screen.
The laptop case will be made out of: Carbonfibre panels, drain pipe, atx case mother board tray (cut down) and aluminium edge strip.