Cabling and power button

This would have been another pretty major progress post, and it fact it is, but a large setback has also been discovered. The courage was finally mustered to start modding the internal fan and power cables, which resulted in a level up in soldering technique, as well as a bunch of modified cables. In fact, all internal power-cables have been shortened, while the case fan cable was swapped for a longer one.

The most hairy part was without a doubt to shorten the 24-pin motherboard power cable. This was given a new black housing (as was the 4-pin 12V one), which meant reattaching all the 24 tiny pins, and putting them in the correct place in the housing. Even after loudly calling out on a large social network site for a crimp plier, which is supposed to the perfect for this task, none was found. Therefore the attachment was done only using short-sightedness, a regular thin plier, and for good measure some soldering was applied to ensure they didn't come off.

Given the circumstances, the achieved result is largely satisfactory.

The last thing needed to start proper testing of the Detectron is the power-button. If you remember the phidgets that were ordered way back in the early days of this project, one kit there actually included a handful of switches. One of these, together with a heavily miniaturized button from the case, was used to construct a button. A salvaged power switch cable was attached and voilá: power button online!

Using the power-button, after connecting the regular peripherals, the system was turned on for the second time in it's prolonged life. Luckily, it seems that all cable modification have been successfull - everything started like a charm.

However, as promised at the start of this post, a new issue was discovered that had been happily ignored so far.

Heat.

When sitting idly with the case closed, CPU-temperatures didn't stabilize until 48 °C. Even though it is not possible to properly stress-test the system yet as there is no operating system, this will likely become a problem. Opening the case lid and redoing the test, lowers the stable temperature to 35 °C, indicating that the case ventilation is the likely culprit. This is perhaps not surprising - compared to a regular case there are quite small air inlets, and the tight space only allowed installation of a 40mm case fan. Some strategy is clearly needed to alleviate this issue, and any input would be very helpful! Currently all ideas are good: more and larger ventilation holes, more case fans, top side air inlet directly to the CPU fan or even copper heat transfer to the aluminium rim to allow some passive cooling. Too be continued...

Halftime!

With this update, an arbitrary milestone is reached. Now all bought essential computer components have been mounted successfully into the Detectron case. This post will feature some pictures of the newly built ventilation paths to the CPU fan, the integrated SSD mount, and some cablework with the PSU cables. Then some coming work units will be discussed.

According to the previous layout a ventilation system was needed to draw fresh air onto the CPU. This construction went reasonably smoothly, and even though the edge of the black plastic part is very unsatisfactory (built from an old diskette case - lol, diskette!), overall it seems to work. The hard part this time turned out to be the SSD mount. Originally this was planned to sit on top of the ventilation drum, but this layout just didn't fit. Eventually the entire backplate of the ventilation drum was taken off, and replaced by the SSD itself. The 3 mm saved, plus trimming down of the now cosmetic back piece with case fan, just managed to get the SSD in there.

As is easy to tell from these pictures, the cabling needs a lot of love to create some order. Here follows a list of minor work to be done:

• Build power-button, and attach it. 
• Solder PSU cabled to outer socket. Somehow isolate.
• Shorten and tidy up PSU ATX cables (swap housings, sleeve?, fasten to walls)
• Get super short SATA 6 Gps cable. Probably 10 cm.
• Lengthen case fan cable.

After these work units, everything needed to use the Detectron as a computer will be finished. Then comes the bells and whistles!

Hinges, hinges, hinges...

The most annoying thing in the world has turned out to be hinges. No, the casual observer might not notice the subtle evil radiating from these two-piece tail-turners, but when faced with the seemingly simple task of filling their function in connecting a lid to a case - real devils!

In the post at present being posted, the strains suffered in constructing the lid of the Detectron case will be described. It would be pleasing to say this is to warn future Detectron modders, but in honestly the aim is rather to alleviate post-traumatic stress, and, boast a bit.

Hinges, as many things in the physical world, need to be attached to something to work properly. As a first suggestion, an attempt was made to attach them to the Detectron case on one end, and to the lid on the other. Therefore a backpiece was made (more pics here).

This beautiful backpiece with it's extremely tight fit, did not work however, because of curves. The lid as well as case is sporting curved corners, which is pretty, but also means that in combination with the aluminium frame, the revolving axis of the lid needs to sit further out from the top. Therefore, exit beautiful backpiece, and enter second backpiece.

Having renewed faith in this backpiece, the hinges got semi-properly attached by screw, and a quite nice case fan grill and mount was made on the back of it. Careful testing of the function was made using the lid and double sided tape. It seemed to work. So, the only thing left was to glue on the lid.

Gluing plastic on plastic in a cold garage did not work. At least not in the half an hour stipulated in small print on the all purpose glue. Wait - plastic on plastic? Yes, since the hinges are not even, a small spacer was needed to get a flat surface to glue onto the lid. Since this spacer needed to be as small a possible for the lid to open properly, it was decided that the lid of an old ice cream box was just about thick enough. It wasn't. Or at least, didn't stick. Ok, but these things are easy to fix. With some thinned down wooden spacers, and all gluing surfaces sanded to maximize gluing strength, glue round two began.

This time it worked. That is, the gluing of the hinges to the lid worked. The lid, however, did not in any way accept working as a lid. Instead, it folded nicely from the open position all the way until getting stuck by 2-3 mm on the aluminium frame. Curses unmentioned, no conceivable modification could be thought of to fix this issue, except loosening the hinge-backpiece screws quite a bit to allow more freedom of movement. That gave an extremely rattely feel to the entire thing, as was abandoned as way too unsatisfactory.

What now?

Time to start over of course! Off with the cursed hinges. Now the backpiece is sort of redundant, but because of the nice work with the case fan, it will stay for show.

The major fault of the tried hinges was that the revolving axis got too far away from the lid plane. But how can this be solved? Well one way is of course to construct something hinge-like from scratch. This plan involved putting two small nails into the lid to make a new revolving axis, and let this rest on some metal construction on the case. For attaching hinge-like nails to the lid, the go-to method is naturally: gluing.

Perfect. On the case, something now needed to hold these nails up so the lid turns nicely when opened, rather that falling directly onto the motherboard. At first, simply gluing some holders made from the same ventilation grill as used for the air holes was considered. But this solution made it very hard to completely attach and detach the lid when needed, and in effect made it impossible to get the revolving axis completely in line with the closed lid. Therefore, a more flexible solution with adjustable holders was implemented.

Glorious? Yes indeed.

Is this it? No way.

This solution has the downside that since the case is now a bit smaller, getting the lid nails in and on the supports is theoretically impossible. Practically it works with a little force. Since people live in the real world rather than the theoretical, that would have been acceptable if it weren't for another fact.

The. lid. still. doesn't. close.

It turns out that the newly added hinge-supports on the case collide with the thin pieces of wood glued onto the lid to fasten the nails. Right. But since case modding essentially is all about gluing stuff on lids, why not make one last round?

Since it's about time to wrap up and stop ranting, let's just look at these:

Thanks, and good night.

Power interface

The interface for connecting external power was mounted. To make the hole a number of small hole were drilled, followed by a whiles filing and carving to get a perfect size.

Air holes

Some scary sawing was done, during which the awesome oscillatory saw broke down to much dismay. Must have been a poor sample. Grill were glued on, and now there is only one last air outlet to make.

Case fan mounting

The case fan will be mounted under the handle on the top of the Detectron case. With the plan to add hinges to the Detectron lid, space was vary scarce, and the case fan needed to be situated all the way to the backside of the case. To support both hinges and case fan, a very satisfactory wooden backpiece was constructed.

However, this turned out not to work at all for mounting the hinges, as the revolving axis needed to be further in than what this construction allowed. Hinges are terrible things, that will be painstakingly described later. There was nothing else to do than to scrap this nice one, and make a new version of the backpiece. The fan will be mounted directly on the grill using four longer bolts, and eventually using nuts instead of a rubber band.