Posted by Krux on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @ 04:11am
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I've been spending a lot of the past several days working on a new case mod project for my desktop PC, Raven.

And you can see a mpeg of the mod in action:
http://krux.org/misc/raven-bboys.mpg

I've made the schematic available via popular request:
http://krux.org/misc/led-vu.pdf
I started by doing some concept art sketches of what I wanted, and eventually came up with a silhouette of a raven with it's wings out stretched. I then did a finalized sketch in pencil on the front of my case and went over it with a black Sharpe.

Next I went into the garage and started cutting with the dremel tool. I have a flex shaft attachment for the dremel which gives you a lot more control, especially in tight places or where detail is involved. I was able to get all the large areas with a sideways cutting bit designed for working with woods and plastics. After that I switched to a smaller grinding bit to get a little more detail, and finally used a hacksaw blade, 1/32" drill bit, a utility knife and sand paper to finish.

Then it was time to design the lighting.. I wanted to do a light organ or bar-graph vu tied into the sound card's output so it would change in time to the rocket fire, music, etc.. I had a couple IC's designed just for doing a VU type circuit, so that's what I went with. I made a test circuit with the parts I had on hand to see if the concept would work.

Several trips to various radio shacks later I had all the parts I needed for the finished model and was well on to soldering everything together.

Once the circuit was complete and adjusted, next was the task of mounting the components in my system. I used some of the computer hardware I had on hand to make a custom 5 1/4" drive bay chassis to place the controls, as well as hold everything. Ribbon cable runs from that to the front of the computer behind the cutout where various colored LEDs are located. And as a finishing touch I used the dremel to cut some pieces of aluminum from an old pentium heat sink to create mini heat sinks for the two amplifier chips. They aren't really needed, but they'll protect the chips should the circuit get adjusted incorrectly. I let the magic blue smoke out of the first chip I did that to. Not to mention heat sinks = cool. heh..

There are still a couple things I want to do to finish things up, as well as some other features I want to add in the future, but for all intensive purposes it was a successful mod.