Hi all,
I have been watching these forums for a while now and I have finally decided to jump in and do a project.

This project is for my wife who's name is Rainbow so naturally she loves all things that are rainbow related. This project spawned from the need to get her off my computer! I am sure a lot of projects happen because of girlfriends or wives that stop the men from getting on the computer when they want to. She mainly uses the machine for emailing so the machine doesn't need to be all that great.....

however, being a lover of cool and shiny toys and also having rainbow theme I am opting to deck out this case and cram it with all kinds of power. It may be a waste, but I plan to put Windows Vista on it when it gets released so I imagin that will need some serious power to get all the eye candy running smoothly.

This is my first mod so I am going to need a lot of help along the way figuring out the details so please feel free to tell me if any of the ideas will be to difficult. And now the project specifics:
- Case Configuration
I'm going to go with a mini-itx form factor to keep it small, but I am going to use a AMD or P4 motherboard with 1 GB of memory and a decent graphics card.
I am going with a high performance Desktop drive since the drive is the slowest part of the system. I will probably use a raptor or possibly 2 in raid zero.
Slot load DVD-RW/CD-RW
I want to put a Seinnheiser wireless headphone transmitter in it along with the guts out of my Desktop speakers so that it can play music without external speakers and then with the push of a button switch to the headphones for silent operation throughout the house.

So that is the guts, now the design.
- Logo
I want to make it in the style of the Mac-mini except taller. The bottom section will house the speakers and the amp circuitry and will be opaque white plexi. It will be lit up white with led's so there will be a glow out the bottom of the case. I am also thinking of ligting pulses to the music or possibly ligting themes tied into the power management. So if it is in standby the lighting is a mellow blue, then when it is on it is bright white, etc.

The middle section will be the power distribution section and will also house the DVD drive and possibly a character LCD, since I always wanted to do a cool LCD project. This section will be made out of stacked 1/4 inch plexi in the colors of a rainbow so that when you power on the box a horizontal rainbow stripe lights up all around the box. I want to use one power cord to feed the PC, the headphones, and the speakers. I am going to need some help with this, any thoughts?

The top section will house the PC guts. Nothing special here except for a custom logo that will light up when the power is on. The power button will be a sun with the power indicator LED lighting the middle of the sun and the HD activity LED lighting the corona.
- Power Button

Things I will need to figure out along the way is how to make the DVD drive play music without turning on the PC.
How to split the power coming in to feed the correct voltage and current to the speakers, headphones, and PC. Should I use a power brick and then a DC-DC converter for the PC or a full blown PSU and somehow figure out how to feed the speakers and headphones? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I will post some drawings here when I get access or I will post links to them on my other site. Thanks all and I hope to entertain everyone with my many mistakes and successes over the next few months.

Sabadam

I will be moving over the next month so I will be dropping this for a while.

Quote: Originally Posted by sabadam Hi all, I have been watching these forums for a while now and I have finally decided to jump in and do a project.

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Going to use this motherboard:
http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/LV-674.HTM

I was hoping to find a decent AMD board in the mini-itx form factor but couldn't. If anyone knows of one pass it along.

Anybody have a good idea about which PCI Express graphics card I should use. I have a Ati Radeon 9800 right now that I like, but not sure what would be good for the the pci express bus.

Also thinking of using El-Wire for lighting effects. Has anyone used this? If so how bright are they and how easy is it to use?

A lot different than most of my builds,but always checking out new ideas.Love the Rainbow for Wife build though,most of mine go to a Family member.That is the fun of it all.Jo

Thats an exotic name for a women, Welcome to PCA.

Quote: Things I will need to figure out along the way is how to make the DVD drive play music without turning on the PC

I have an Asus Socket A mobo, and it has this feature. On some CD-ROM drives you can just apply power and take the output of the CD off of the headphone jack in front. But it can only read Audio CD's

Quote: How to split the power coming in to feed the correct voltage and current to the speakers, headphones, and PC.

Amps (depeding on wattage) can use alot of current when hitting peak volume, when calculating for regular power specs, be sure to read the sheet for the amp to see how much current it takes up. Most amps take 12V (Well if your planning on using a car Amp) so you can just use a spare molex connector for power. Just be sure to hook up R (t think thats it) to +12.

Quote: Should I use a power brick and then a DC-DC converter for the PC or a full blown PSU and somehow figure out

Power bricks probably wont supply enough current. You could use another PSU for the Amp, or just add on the wattage for the PSU (see above)

LCD is easy, see this guide for info, or contact me or Twizted for more info (if you dont want to hook up your own)

OK so I have made it out to Utah and what a week it has been. Dealing with Comcast for Internet is like an exercise in anger management. No chance for DSL where I am livin' though so I got to bend over and take it from the Man again.

The good news is that the garage and the basement are available for me to set up shop. The bad news is I can't find a place out here to supply acrylic sheeting and various other goodies. If any of you modders are in the Salt Lake area and know af any suppliers I would apreciate the help. Still don't have a phone book either.

I am looking to set up a workbench with a few tools. Right now I have the standard Dremel. I want to know what I should buy for the shop to get the most bang for the buck. There are a few attachments for the Dremel like a routing table and a plunge routing/cutting attachment. I am also looking at a bench mounted drill press and bandsaw. There is a bench mounted sanding station also that I think might be useful. In your experiances, what have you found to be the most useful tools? Any of the above? What would you recommend? The case this time will be out of acrylic and thin steel or aluminum plates, but I also plan to do some additional work with wood and acrylic. So the tools would need to be able to handle it all.

See this post
http://forums.pcapex.com/case_moddin...s_toolbox.html

Drill press is useful, so is a vice, Table saw for cutting plexy (thats what I use for big peices), jigsaw, ruler,sharpie, Square (its a triangle thing)

OK here is the idea for the case. The shell is made from plexi and the motherboard tray and other mounts will be made out of steel or aluminum plates. More pics to follow. I am going to get the plexi today so I can start working on it this weekend.

The project has taken a back seat to the kid safety gates I have to make for the new place. It has been good too because I have a lot of other ideas for the computer.

The problems I want to solve with this PC have really been better identified. Aside from building my wife a PC it needs to do 2 things. One of those is boot up fast. I was thinking big processor + loads of memory, but that really isn't it, the bottleneck on my current system seems to be the drives. I think I am going to need a raptor Raid 0 here to get this puppy up and running quickly. Can anybody comment on the speed benefits, not only for booting, but for loading programs and working with GB video files? I have read an article about it and it seems to be a noticable gain and well worth the money so what the heck.

Secondly this PC will be the place that we do all our video editing and processing of the family photos. Therefore it will be in a very accessable place, i.e. the living room. So I want to do away with most of the cables because I have a little boy who loves to pull on them. So I only want one power cable going in and one monitor cable going out. Everything else will be wireless. The speaker box built in is still the way to go. Then I will add a wireless keyboard and mouse which I will have to modify to fit the theme, wireless headphones for silent listening, and wireless networking to finish it all off.

I am still kicking around designs. I know it has to have a rainbow in it somewhere, but I am not sure how I want to incorperate the colors. I was thinking a horizontal rainbow stripe around the middle of the case, but that seems a little boring.

In any case I will have the safety gates finished by the weekend and I plan to start building the forms to bend up the case after that. Should finally have some pictures to take a look at late next weekend.

If you have any suggestions about design or comments about the direction this is going feel free to chime in. I could use a little help since this is my first PC being built from scratch.