Copied and pasted from my worklog at gruntville.
OK guys I've kept you all out of the light for the results of the front panel for too long so here you all are.
While the front panel was in the wuiet room in the house curing:
I figured I'd get everything prepped while I was waiting a few days. But hye, those were a good hunk of wires in that last pic. I'd hate to have to pull all them out everytime I need to detatch the panel. Even worse, everything was permanently attatched. So I came up with a solution. A front panel hub.
But where would I get the needed connections? None other than an old friend.
For instance, I used the ends off an old CD-ROM drive cable and the connector and the pins from the board to create the plug. Since the CD-ROM connector had 4 wires, and each temp sensor utilized 2 wires for power and two for sensing, it was perfect!
So then I selleved and shrunkwrapped everything. The result? I quick disconnect hub capable of handling two temp sensors, 4 LED channels, a seperate LED channel for the bulgin light, and 3 3pin fan connectors. It will be well hidden unless the side panel is taken off, so I wasn't too concerned with making it look flawless on the outside, just so long as everything plugged in perfect and the board did not move around inside. I used two LED's in the project box. The blue tells me that the hub is recieving 12V power, while the red is a 5V indicator.
In case you are wondering, in the empty space right next to it will go the project box housing the vandal system (taser) I am currently working on.
OK, so I had about 2 days left. The next step was to prep the blowhole fans. For those of you who have been keeping up with this thread, There was a big fiasco where I FORGOT to install the resistors in not one, but BOTH fans and ended up blowing up all 8 LED's. So with some new LED's and the proper metal oxide resistor in hand, I got to work. The goal was to mount 4 ultra birhgt red LED's around the fans and have a seperate lead wire going to them. Why you ask? Well, thats a suprise!
OK well, maybe not such a suprise since I'm telling you in the next paragraph, but here was the purpose for the seperate lead.
I orginally thought this was going to be complicated to make, but once I began studying it it was suprisingly simple. Al I needed was a piece of PC board, a diode, a resistor, an LED, some jumpers and a 12V micro relay.
That was the result, and on the small side too. The entire thing fit right into one of those golden dollar sized earring cases. What it is is a relay circut. I plug the blowhole fans in like normal, and when the PC is on they light up blue with the green lightshow in the middle. However, the relay has 3 connections coming off it. The first, is a simple 3 pin fan plug that is plugged to the motherboard. This acts as the "sensor" that will tell the relay whether the PC is on or off. The second is a wire tapping right into the 5vsb pin on my power supply, and the third is a wire going to the seperate lead on the LED's. I hooked this lead to the relay's normally closed, which means whenever the pc is turned on, the coil recieves 12V, energizes, and breaks the link from the 5vsb and everything appears normal.
When the power supply is in an off state however, the coil loses power, and switch back to the normally closed circut, bridging the connection with the 5vsb.
Each fan has to have It's own 1 watt metal oxide resistor, but the relay is capable of a maximum current flow of 1 amp. Figure each fan (4 LED's) at the most uses 100ma each. That leaves me plenty of room for other things to attatch to the relay (like the acrylic vapochill enclosure for example).
Now, for the coup de gras. The final photos of the front panel. Before I show them though, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is that throughout the photos, there are several spots which look like a ding, smudge in the paint, or a scratch. This was just dust that only decided to show itself under the flash. The second, is that the paintjob I did is highly reflective (you can see the blowholes reflecting the fan grills), so when the flash hit it, it made it look a dull grayish color. To the naked eye however it is actually a suave looking deep dark black. So aside from a horrib mass of fingerprints I have to whipe off, I think it turned out pristine (Yes I know I'm missing the left temp sensor It's on my agenda). I am using putfile for these as photobucket allows for only very crappy resolutions (Click the thumbnails for full sized photos).
What I found the most humorus of the whole situation though, is that even in It's crippled state through the whole modding process, the PC was still able to get me through hitman blood money for hours on end.
Hope you all like
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