I had some ideas for a nice, custom-made control panel floating around in my head; now it was time to look at the required parts and figure out how to make it.
In my "goodies" package that I selected from Glitterkill was a set of UV cathodes. I had a second set lying around from that AC Ryan prize pack that I won, so I planned how to make a control panel in a spare 5.25" drive cover to fit them in. (Cost-wise, what's important to note is the making of your own custom control panel instead of buying one, or just using the PCI slots in the back which can get really messy if you have a lot of wires.) Store-bought modding "baybuses" usually won't exactly match whatever your color scheme is, they all look generic, and to me, the same old boring "blue LED-lighted buttons" got real old several years ago. Nothing matches your existing color scheme more than using your own spare drive bay covers.
I was hoping to use the same bay cover to control not only the UV cathodes, but also the
HSF and possibly
GPU fan controllers I have yet to buy. So the challenge becomes, "How do you fit all that in a single 5.25" bay?"
It soon was obvious that I'd have to lose the silver plastic housings of the cathode controllers, to conserve space. After unscrewing the 2 bolts holding each one together, I found that the PCBs/switch assemblies slid out easily. Then, I just had to figure out a way to mount those PCBs perpendicularly to the inside of the spare 5.25" bay cover---which (as you'll see) was a much more complicated task than I expected...