Fitting it all together
With the rig finally in place I could now start to do some of the electronic mod's. First thing's first, like all cool cases, there has to be a few blue LED's on it somewhere. Conveniently this case has the hard drive and power LED's in little connectors - it was a simple matter of pulling out the green LED's and pushing in blue ones, no soldering needed :)
As mentioned previously, an LCD display and buttons will be mounted on the door along with three fan 'rheo' dials. Cutting a neat small rectangular hole in plastic can be quite tricky - a jig saw is too bulky and has a nasty habit of melting plastic. I decided to use a tile cutter to score an outline of the hole. Then using a close quarter hacksaw (basically a hacksaw blade on a stick) I carefully cut along the scored lines. After lots of filing and sanding, the hole was looking respectable:
The holes for the buttons and the dials were then drilled. The LCD to be used in this project is not your usual serial LCD display that connects to the serial port. The serial based LCD's under PC control work well, but only work once Windows has booted, and stop responding if the system crash's etc. This is a raw LCD display that will be under direct control from a microprocessor, which also control's the entire system. This allows the temperatures, fans and other sensors to be monitored all the time - even when the PC is off!. The microprocessor board will be powered from the 5 volt standby line from the PSU, so even when the system is in 'soft off' the display, sensors and menu buttons will still be active.
The display was stuck to the door using double sided foam tape on the LCD edges. The buttons were e-poxied into place. I had to use multiple, multi-cored wires for now. I plan to order a thick 30 core black cable and tidy up the back of the door in the next article.
Yum! Finally a non-flash shot that shows the true colour of the case :)
The fan controller is not an ordinary rheostat based controller, neither is it one of the more advanced voltage regulator types. It's a custom built, very efficient 'mark-space' ratio controller, which basically means that very little power is wasted as heat and it can handle huge power loads per channel, i.e. multiple large fans. It has minimum speed presets and a fan kick start feature that will allow the fans to run at much lower speeds than normal. Unfortunately the electronic schematics of this controller are classified as I intend to sell them in an online shop in association with hexus.
Above is the prototyping electronics board that sits above the PSU at the back of the case. The microprocessor circuitry is not yet complete, once completed it will digitally control the fan speeds, adjusting them according to CPU load, ambient temperatures etc. It will also monitor multiple temperature sensors (displaying them on the front LCD display) and have the ability to immediately cut mains power to the case if any of the preset temperature's are exceeded or cooling system faults detected.
With all the cutting out of the way, I can now begin to put the PC components into the case. There's plenty of room in the lower part of the case so assembly was straight forward. Mounting the evaporator block was a little more trickier than doing it outside of the case, but with some bending of the pipe I eventually got it all lined up properly.
Since there is a big window on the side of the case I had to ensure the wiring was neat and tidy :) I folded the supplied black IDE cable in half, so it didn't take up as much room. Then I spiral wrapped a spare IDE cable for the CD-ROM drive(s). The floppy cable is a pre-manufactured black rounded cable. Using cable tie mounts I tidied up the motherboard LED lead. The hard drive is actually fitted in one of the upper 3.5" floppy bays - this allows me to hide the cables from view and also use the lower tray for the Geforce 4 water pump. From the photo's you can also see I fitted a UV Black cold cathode light, again using cable tie mounts. I hid the inverter for the CC light in a gap between the support bar going across the case.
With the components in place I proceeded to stick down the pax mate sound dampening material. Pax mate comes in four pieces designed to fit the sides, top and bottom of the case. I had to do a bit of cutting of the material to fit it round the window and on the top panel.
Not only does this material significantly reduce vibrations and block some of the fan noise, but it also looks very stylish. One minor draw back is the glue on this stuff stinks to high heaven!, this wears off after a few days though, thankfully!
That concludes part three of project Black Ice. In the next, and most likely final, article I will go into full detail on the construction of the Geforce 4 cooling system.
