Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Building a Small Low Powered Machine, part 2
plingboot
Without the cassette playing innards the box had a large gaping hole in the front panel. That’s just begging to have an alpha numeric LCD in it I thought. I found a blue/white LCD on eBay, it looked the business in the photo. I could just imagine the romantic evenings in, lights dimmed and bright blue displays of MHz and Mb/s flickering softly in the (scented) candle light - I bought it!
I wanted my PC to be sleek (bordering on PC metrosexual?) and that meant no trailing parallel LCD cable hanging out of the back - no that would look rubbish. I’d try to keep the visible connectors and switches to a bare minimum. This means just one power button at the front and only network, USB, audio/video and power connectors at the rear. I figured by rotating the board in the case there would be space to keep my LCD wiring entirely internal.
A £1.99 Maplin port extender would be the base for my new rear connectors. Hacked to bits, I removed its mic socket and transplanted a network socket from an old ISA NIC I had lying around. I also added a phono socket for the video out and knocked up a few internal cables to connect the extender to the sockets on the main board. The back plate was drilled with holes to fit the new extender snuggly.
Lovely, new sockets for the back.
I fashioned two hard drive brackets out of an old power supply case and screwed and glued them into the main box. A small 60W fanless power supply was mounted on the base.
Nice but will the mainboard fit in the box?
At this point I thought it probably a good idea to see if the mainboard would fit in the box…
I needn’t have worried, everything rams in just fine.
Thankfully it did! Cause for celebration indeed.
In part three I get to grips filler, sand paper and lots of spray paint as I attempt the face job. Stay tuned.
This article has no comments yet.