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...
