MiniHack

ElAwesome, on 19 May 2013 - 01:16 PM, said:

Thank you.

Just also bought this one: http://www.ebay.co.u...984.m1438.l2649

I couldn't resist it as I am needing to drive down that way soon for a family celebration so I can call in and collect on the way.

I have modified my backplate design a little and that should be with me in the next week or so and will also be the basis for a new laser hive product line.

Basically I have made a complete backplate outline which, though I am cutting it for my own mobo pattern, I will easily be able to adapt for a standard ATX rectangular IO pattern. That new plate will then be bondable to the original back so it can be blended in to the original plate and allow the user to either keep the original handle mechanism (or get rid of it) and to either keep the original small holes on the "wide" side of the cube or get rid of them. If the user wants to get rid of them it will then be an easy conversion to add a wider (more open) mesh for higher airflow if wanted - which is what I'll be doing to mine.


This will be a new design to add to my website and it will be able to be ordered with custom re-positioning of the rectangular ATX IO to wherever the modder wants to put it - all I will need to ask for customising is the relative position of the bottom left corner of the ATX shield.


It won't be a full conversion kit (there are too many different ways of Cube modding to be able to do that). But it will let people have an easy way to tidy up their own backplate, it will add a few more millimetres of wiggle room front to back for PicoPSUs and it will give choice and an easy way to customise the air paths by opening new ones up or closing some off. I am aiming at a price point of just £18 for the plate to retail to the customer and it will be a special order item because of the need for the plate to have the ATX shield in the place of user choice (and also to account for either full height or half height ITX shields).

Rampage Dev, on 18 May 2013 - 04:29 AM, said:

Videos for the comp. should be viewable via Youtube.

Designs for cutting should ideally be in CorelDraw, adobe illustrator, dxf or some vector graphics format  (2D designs only).

So, a bit of an update today.

The aluminium rivetnuts arrived and so did a aluminium plate I had cut for the Cube.

So it was now time to get the files and dremel out again and do a bit more fitting up.

These are the rivetnuts for the new hanging system so I can get rid of the handle assembly:



Tip: if you have a cheap hand operated rivet tool M6 rivet nuts in aluminium are about the limit that I think you can mount properly!

Still, this open style of rivet nut will flush mount and give a really strong thread. First I had to open up the holes in the inner cage a little to take the rivet.





Then they went in fine



This is the result:





Opening up the holes in the perspex and also a little in the top plate for the outer case meant the Cube will then be able to be secured in the case using some cap screws.









The aluminium laser cut turned out well.



and here you can also see how I have cut out the handle section (I'll replace this bit later with a more open mesh).





So, this is where it is right now. Still working things out and fitting them up but it is coming together.

A couple of shots for scale on how this compares to the internal size of the Cube:

Keeping this build quiet and within the power limits of the pico psu are two of the most important parts of this build, as well as seeing if it can cope with a mildly overclocked 3770k.

As part of this I am trying to test everything for power consumption/noise before it goes in to the Cube.

Just been test running the Corsair pump and Alphacool radiator combination, along with the two Phobya fans hooked up to a simple Asetek fan controller (literally about £3 inc. postage).

Noise from the fans at full tilt is reassuringly loud with a good through breeze, but when I use the controller it can  be turned down to something less than audible.

Power draw at the wall from the combination of pump, and two fans is 14w (inc the draw from the ATX PSU itself that I am testing them on) at max settings and goes down to around 9 or 10 at lower speeds. Disconnecting the fans and pump and measuring just the draw from the PSU with fan shows that as taking about 5 watts - so in reality my fans and pump combo is taking a max of about 9W.

Seems okay.

The only other power consumption apart from main board and processor will be by myToshiba SSD (that I think is supposed to be  an incredibly small 1.5W) and a slot loader that supposedly will run from a single USB input and therefore about 2.5W max.


In theory then I should have a maximum of up to 130W allowable for the onboard consumption of CPU, board and RAM for any overclock experiments....

So far so good.