[Worklog]: Project Black and White

[Dk_vr]

Hello everybody,
For the last few days I've decided to build a new project from scratch.
It will be a small, stylish and theme based project for a small case/stand based on mini ITX motherboard with as few as possible peripheral devices.
The idea of the project is to be slim stand/case hand made mod with some visual effects.
The base of the machine will be Intel® Desktop Board DN2800MT mini ITX, which I dont have yet.

Sponsors:

- Cold Cathodes

- Mini ITX motherboard

- Cooler Master Excalibur 120mm fan


Before I start I want to share some details. There is no scheme, no drawings, no lasers . Everything is in my head and will be build by hand on the move. For now I cant tell what will be the end product.


Here we go..

After I finished drawing and choosing place for the motherboard my camera betrayed me. For that reason I couldn't make pictures from the begining.

First cut on the base platform:



Few more cuts:






Sanding the first platform:








First platform at 30% ready with motherboard mounted:


This is for now, more updates on the way:

[Dk_vr]

After I went back to my home tome for the fast 4 days(Easter celebrations) I've decided to use that time and work.

Except the plastic, I was thinking to use aluminium or stainless steel plates but after all, the choice was aluminium.

Cutting process:














After I got some of the parts needed I had to invest a lot of time sanding them:























Lets say they are ok, so it was drilling time





















With motherboard on:





To be continue....

[Dk_vr]

After I finished the first part, it was about time to work on the second:







Before I started sanding the plastic, I've decided to drill and attach the aluminium plates, so they can be my guide while sanding.







It was too late, but I did some sanding.

[Dk_vr]

New update:

After I've mounted the aluminium plates to the plastic and finished sanding the part looks like this:



First test with light:





And both parts together:





Meanwhile, Elitegroup promised to sponsor me with: Elitegroup CDC-TI (V1.0A) and Revoltec with RM131 and RM130.

[B-Shot]

Looking cool so far

[Dk_vr]

Thanks,
I am glad that you enjoy it!


Ok... one more piece of the puzzle

Today I had some free time and I've decided to make the second plate, which will be the base for SSD and CCL invertors.



Its absolutely the same as the first one, but this time I've cut it faster and nicer.







After I finished cutting and started sanding, an urgent job popped up so I will finish it other time.

[bluc]

Nice work :-) Looking forward to more updates!! The acrylic piece with the aluminium on top do you plan to embedded an led in the plastic Cause I am working on a scratch build to and am wondering how to drill into the end grain of the acrylic. Would a dowel jig work?

[Dk_vr]

Well I was thinking about leds from the side panel but I've decided to use cold cathods.
Anyway to drill the corner of the acrylic u will need a coloumn drilling machine and very precise and steady hand. As advice you can use smaller leds. For example if the acrylic is 5mm, you can freely use 2-3mm leds, but they wont be so bright I guess.

[Dk_vr]

Before I continue with the project I want to show what parts I got so far:

1. The cold cathodes from Revoltec



2. The power and reset buttons:



Ok here we go.
In Bulgaria we had 4 days off from work and I used that time to go back to my home town and use our workshop:



Last week I cut the second acrylic plate and I had to do some sanding and make the aluminium plates for it:





I did those plates and I've decided to do some sanding on that acrylic plate. After 20 mins if sanding and my father watching me he decided to help with some serious machine sanding. After 2 mins the plate was complete and my ego was ruined:



All parts so far:





Next step was drilling the holes to mount the acrylic and the aluminium plates together:







After those parts were mounted together I had to do again some small polishing to make them fit perfect:





After all was done on that part my job continued with assembling those 3 full parts together and drilling the holes:





The last step for that day was to drill the holes for the buttons:





More pictures incoming.

[Dk_vr]

Last week I showed only half of the project's progress and it's time to show the rest of the pictures.

After I drilled the holes for the buttons it was about time to assemble those main parts to see what they look like.



After all parts were together, I decided to make the holes for the bolts bigger and increased their size from 3mm to 4mm.

At the beginning of the project I was thinking to make it like 4 parts with some standoffs between those plates, unfortunately the regular long nuts with inner diameter 4mm were only 15mm long and that wasn't enough. For that reason my father took a new big and noisy machine and we had to cut some 27mm pieces from stainless steel:



At the beginning we cut only 6 pieces at size 27mm and polished them with a drilling machine and sanding disc so I can mount those parts together:


To be able to assemble both parts together I had to cut long bolts into different size smaller bolts and attach them with round nuts.
After I had the first bolts and tubes ready I assembled the first parts together:





Since the drilled holes in both plexi parts were more, my father cut a few more stainless steel tubes at 27mm and I prepared the bolts plus polished the tubes.



After all the mounting parts were ready we installed the third main part of the project and all together they look like that:







After all parts were together I had to install the plexi feet that I had bought a few days before.



All parts were mounted together and the project looks like that:

[nigelke]

loving it

[Dk_vr]

loving it

Thanks!
Today or tomorrow I will attach the light modules to the mod and the effect is great

[Dk_vr]

A small unofficial update with the lights. I say unofficial because I just had some fun and the lights are not ready yet.







Enjoy

Best Regards

[Dk_vr]

Been awhile since I played with lights and they looked quite nice, but really could not stay that way. Since the total thickness of plexi plus the two aluminum plates was 7 mm and the LED strip is 8 mm, I concluded that I should install the lights inside the plexi.







After I installed the first LED strip I just had to test how it performs



Once I finished the first part I did the same with the second platform on which the motherboard is mounted. Once it was assembled, it looked like this:



Of course, I had to see how it looks assembled:



Seems I turned the connector, but was too late.



"Fear of the dark"


Best Regards

[Dk_vr]

While waiting for the motherboard to come, so I can make the fourth part of the project, I decided to work on the cables that I’m going to need.

The first one I’m going to use is for powering the LED stripes. I needed to modify something, of course:



The cable is meant for powering and regulating 3 fans but I cut out the regulating cable and modified it as a fourth power one:



I had to apply some sanding the connectors:



And then came the best part – sleeving:



I had a SATA cable as well, so I sleeved it too:



After finishing the cables, I took some pictures of the whole structure put together:





Best Regards

[Dk_vr]

I had some free time today, so I decided to make the cables connecting the motherboard to the turn on and restart buttons.

This is the result:





And assembled:



When I come to the final assembling, I will put heatshrink on the buttons and finish them.

[Dk_vr]

During the last few days I had some time to work on the project and this time I worked on the top most part (the fourth one) and I even had time to fix it to the rest.



This time I decided not to bore you with detailed information because the process is the same, so I am just going to show you some key moments from the construction of the fourth part, which will cover the motherboard.



Of course we have aluminum plates here too.



Again, I needed some stainless steel tubes and bolts.



And this is what all parts together look like.





I am not sure if I like the top part.
What do you think? Should I keep it like this or try to make it more aggresive?

Best Regards

[Liam_G]

Nice work, very good craftsmanship. I like the top, maybe you could cut a design or logo out of the top piece of aluminium so the light shines through the top as well. And also I think you should swap the plexi feet for something smaller that doesn't overhang the sides of the bottom piece.

It looks really cool though, unique.

[Dk_vr]

Thanks for the feedback.

Well I am thinking to make some visual effects on those aluminium plates but for now I wont share more information, to keep this interesting.


About the feet, so far I like these the most. Others just doesnt fit of the whole idea.
Anyway they will be the last thing to do, so its plenty of time and work before the project is ready.


Best Regards

P.s. On top plate there will be 120mm fan to cool the motherboard.

[Dk_vr]

Today Cooler Master decided to sponsor me with the Cooler Master Excalibur R4-EXBB-20PK-R0 fan, which I intend to use for cooling the whole structure and the motherboard with all elements on it.

Thanks for the sample, Cooler Master.

[Dk_vr]

Some more new picture:

[Dk_vr]

After a few weeks’ wait, the motherboard kindly given to me by the Elitegroup colleagues finally arrived! I had planned to use the Elitegroup CDC-TI at the beginning but I assume it is not yet available, so Elitegroup sent me a CDC-I. The two boards have completely different structures; however I will accept this as a challenge and am going to use this one.



The motherboard itself looks like this:



The first model I had chosen was powered directly by an adaptor but this one uses power supply, so I decided to use PICO PSU

This is the mod with mounted motherboard. Of course, this is just done for the test.








I really want to thank all of the sponsors I have so far:

[Dk_vr]

Today I got some free time and since I got a different motherboard sponsored by Elitegroup I had to think of and prepare a new way to power up the motherboard. For that reason I had to sleeve a 24 pin cable.



I bought this as a regular 24 pin extender and modded it a bit by removing the 4 pin because I have 20pin pico PSU and the 4 pins will be useless.

The process:



The result:



This is for now, more updates on the way.

[Dk_vr]

This weekend I had a free day and the chance to go back to my hometown and use the workshop and I’ve decided to work on finishing the last part of the mod and install the motherboard and the cooling fan.



The workday started with disassembling the last part and install the 6 leds strip inside the acrylic. This time I had a machine to do the channel for the leds strip, the cable and the connector.



After 5 mins of cutting the part was ready and I started to do some measuring to install the fan. After more than hour and a half I had all holes drilled on both of the aluminium plates and later on the plexi part. First the holes were smaller but later I’ve decide to make them bigger so there are no bad noises.





And here is the moment when I found that the motherboard that Elitegroup sent me(made a mistake and sent me ECS CDC-I instead of CDC-TI) will give me some troubles. And unfortunately they popped up. After I installed the motherboard on the standoffs I saw that the pico PSU will stand just in front of the case. Except that there was no space to install the Cooler Master Excalibur fan which was sponsored by Cooler Master. For that reason I had to rebuild the mod and find a suitable position for the motherboard and for the fan. That took me some hours but I was able to see the result after I got back at home and the result was:



And all parts assembled:





After all was assembled I was so eager to find out how the lights will work:







After all parts were together I realised I have a working machine, yes still no hard drive but I could see it working. And this is the first movie of Project Black and White working

P.s. I am sorry but I don't know how to insert direct link to youtube video.

[Dk_vr]

Long time has passed since the last update but in this update I will show to all of you some major changes including the top level totally rebuild.

Last week I spent my summer vacation in my home town and a few days at the workshop. There I’ve decided to totally rebuild the top level and finish some more things that I’d planned to do before.

Because the building process is absolutely the same I will skip the details and I will show directly the re-manufactured top part.



After I removed the old part and made this one I noticed that there is one spare hole on the third level and I’ve decided to make it bigger and install the Pico PSU connector for the power adapter.



All of that was done just the first day of my vacation. The next days, things got even more interesting.

After all parts were finally together I had to install the hdd/ssd bracket, arrange the cables and make the holes for the fan cooling the motherboard.

So, let’s get started:



First thing to do was to disassemble the whole build and install the hdd/ssd bracket.

Apart from that I still don’t have ssd and memory I got an ssd bracket used to attach a 2,5″ ssd to 3.5″ slot. To be able to attach it to the motherboard I had to drill some holes.



Mounted



Next thing to do was to install a 2,5″ HDD which I use just to make my plans and install the cables:





OK, I went to work on the mod but I forgot to pick up some mainboard screws so I had to improvise . My bad!

The cables are installed on the first part and later I will have to sleeve them too. Now it’s time to make holes on the second plate and attach the cables to the motherboard.





Some of the cables attached to the motherboard.



After that I had to assemble all of the parts together and the build looked like that:



This is for now, more updates on the way.