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Audio
Console
Power Supply
 Over
the years, I've collected a number of ATX power supplies.
Frankly, I don't even remember where each one came from. I
picked one that had enough empty space that I could cut about
3/4 inch off the sides of the sheet metal. I relocated the
output cable bundle down in the new shorter housing.
A 60 mm
Panaflow fan replaced the original 80mm unit. The fan is mounted
with two screws and seperated from the plastic case by Mortite
weatherstriping caulk. To further reduce noise, a 50 ohm,
12 watt pot is installed on the rear panel to give me control
over the fan speed. Maximum attenuation would yield a voltage
of only 6.2V instead of the normal 12V.
The original
power supply had a 115V/230V switch. It is now hardwired to
115VAC. An input IEC 3-prong power connector and switch are
added to the back panel.
Disk Drive
The single
3-1/2 inch disk drive is mounted on two wooden slats. The
slats are then mounted to the bottom of the case. This is
a lot easier than trying to align screws from the bottom of
the chassis directly into the disk drive. A small rubber grommet
isolates the drive from the wood slat at each screw to reduce
vibration transmission.
Assembly
The motherboard
rests on several raised plastic supports. These were originally
used to support the VCR's PCBs. I used a Dremel to level these
posts to the same height. Only two screws hold the motherboard
in place.
The power
supply is held in place with three small bolts.
In the rear panel, audio line-in and line-out connectors are
mounted (photo left). Both 1/8 inch stereo and RCA connectors
are used. I wanted the option of using a Cirque Glidepad instead
of that little rubber eraser mouse on the keyboard so I installed
a 9-pin serial connector to a header on the motherboard. This
required re-working a ribbon cable. Finally, a single RCA
jack provides NTSC video output. There is no VGA connector.
The photo on the right shows the final layout of the three
main parts - motherboard, power supply and hard disk drive.
USB
With the
main computer built, I turned my attention to expansion capabilities.
With the limitations imposed by the size of the box and the
motherboard used, my only option was USB. For networking,
I used a Netgear WiFi USB dongle. Any other expansion needs
would be attached via a 4-in-1 USB hub. The hub is glued to
the rear of the unit with double sided sticky foam. Cables
for both the hub and the WiFi dongle are coiled and left inside
the chassis.
The picture on the left shows the addition of the USB
cables towards the top of the picture. The picture on the
right shows the position of the USB hub on the back panel
with ports facing up.
Update 14-Oct-2005
The motherboard
audio chip is connected to the output solder pads via the
J7 header. My motherboard did not have the standard 1/8 inch
audio connectors installed on these pads thus the jumpers
from the audio chip were not installed by default. Insert
jumpers on pins 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 of header J7 to enable the
audio chip.
07-July-2005
updated 14-October-2005
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