Thanks! Haha, at the moment I'd say I'm a professional student . I'm in my fourth year and doing my second degree - computer and electronic engineering. Probably going to be at university for the good part of a decade

Lighting update

Okay, I've found a way of producing the 3mm light strip with a pretty uniform colour mixture - all in a compact, very thin package needed to fit between the case and motherboard. This is only a prototype, the final version will be much smaller and not have aluminium foil just wrapped around it

But you can get the idea in the following photos - the first being in lighted conditions and the second in darkness. Sorry for the blurry dark photo, I don't have a tripod with me so I tend to shake the camera with its long exposure. At least you can get an idea on how it will look.

Okay, this is the final circuit for the LED controller using discrete components. I would've liked the red LED's at minimum to be basically off but they are stuck at about 160uA which gives them a VERY faint glow. Not that it will matter in the end anyway.

I took a few pictures to show it working (so that you know I'm sincere ). The circuit on the right on the veroboard is only a power supply I built a while ago for the 5V and 12V needed by the controller (which will be provided by a molex connector). The circuit on full power draws around 200mA total from both the 5V and 12V line so I'm guessing it's dissipating around 2.5Watts!
Idle power (with both circuits off) it's dissipating around 100mW which is mostly attributed to the faint glow on the red LED's.

Everything off to show the circuit


With RED on full power... (it's BRIGHT )...


... UV on full power...


... both at full power...


I think this will be fine for the current use and I can linearly (or more logarithmically I believe) adjust both intensities with fairly good precision. This way I can adjust the colour after everything is in place and shining through the diffusers to match the actual colour

EDIT: Fixed the faint glow by changing a resistor on the bias circuit at the cost of a little reduction in max intensity (although very small). Now the LED's are all off at the lowest setting.

Looks sweet man! I can't wait to see this in the cube.

Controller building

Okay, just finished building the discrete controller board. It's basically as short as I could make it - with resistors even under the potentiometers to save space. Also, I will drill holes in the lips on the side to mount it. Would probably be best to do the layout, but I don't have access to that right now and it won't be seen either way

Getting ready to whip out the Weller! With the components placed.


The controller done. Not the best soldering job I've ever done but it'll work... (I blame the oversized 60W soldering iron )


... top side...


... with it connected to the LED's (once again running on small PSU but wired for molex)...


Now that that's done, I'm going to continue with the corners. Couldn't work yesterday because one of the power phases were off - meaning no sufficient power for the sander.

Construction Day 4/5

So yesterday I didn't make a lot of progress and it wasn't anything you haven't seen before... So here is another update, I think it may be a good one

I actually finished all 8 of the corners today! Took me the good part of today and a few hours yesterday. Feel a bit relieved since they only need minor adjustments now and most of the work is already done.

Here they are all in a nice row - fitting surprisingly good actually


... so since they're all complete, I decided to do a quick mockup of everything I have so far. This is the top view of the cube, with the edges just thrown on there to see if they line up.


A side shot of the cube


Shot from the front to see if the edges fit and to check their clearance.


Finally a shot from above where I rearranged the edges as they would look when they're finished.


I must say it's nice to see everything coming together so well thus far. Can almost see the end result already

Wow! Fantastic update! Those blocks look perfect man!

Okay, so I've been playing around with some perspex and I'm thinking of making the heart discs by thermoforming some perspex. It's going to be tough and might involve some (read a lot) of malformed pieces, but I think it will be nice in the end since I will have the option of lighting the heart forms as well since I'll be using clear perspex...

The heart will then be printed and glued to the surface and varnished so it's flat. Also, the way I'm designing the pivot point for the one heart to swivel it will be easier as it will give me more space.

What do you guys think?
I've quickly tried it on two pieces of scrap perspex to see how the forming works...



I believe that if I make a positive mold and stretch the perspex over it, I will get the effect I'm looking for...

I like it. It's a very unique look, and just screams custom. I say go for it!

Cool, my thoughts exactly

Now I just have to make a mold with the correct dimensions and then I can try my hand at thermoforming some perspex!

Also, I think I've figured out how I'm going to make the backside heart panel swivel. It's a tad complex but I think it will probably work okay... So stay tuned

Construction Day 6

I'm glad to say the perspex thermoforming worked PERFECTLY the first time without making a single dud! Guess it helps to plan ahead

I started by making a mold to stretch the perspex by cutting a piece of MDF and smoothing it on a drill with steel wool till it's extremely smooth - don't want to make marks in the perspex when it's drawn over it...


Next I cut pieces of 2.5mm perspex (which would be easier to form), slightly larger than the mold form... It also happened to be bright fluorescent orange


After I smoothed the edges of the perspex disks, I had all the pieces I needed to start with the forming process


The process is very simple and very fast as well. Start by lining up the disk with the smaller hole of the mold cover...


... then heat the outside of the circle with a heatgun until it's flexible enough to push down fairly easily if you press in the middle. Quickly throw down the gun, and line up the mold precisely in the nick of time...


... and press down! You can see the perspex fits JUST inside the cavity ...


... finally, I pressed everything together with some weights (in the form of some bricks) to ensure everything was flat...


After a few minutes of cooling, I had this left:



All lined up for scale. Notice that the lips aren't square and some are really off center and essentially crooked.


They should be 90mm, so I think I did fairly well on the measurements


Finally, to remedy the crooked lips (sounds a bit... uhm... nevermind), I built a sort of sanding jig to hold the pieces square. The crookedness is obvious here... Before sanding:


... and after. Looking much better I must say.


Also, I begun to assemble the edge parts... Here are the first 4 clamped and waiting to dry. Will do the other 4 tomorrow and then sand their edges again.


All in all a good day I think. Very surprised that the perspex handled so easily! Will definitely use this technique in the future

Wow, that turned out even better than I expected. Great job man!

That's a great idea and amazing execution. Well done good sir.

Thanks!

As I said, I'm as surprised as you guys that it worked so well! Maybe someone here can use the technique in one of their own builds and make something awesome!

Now I just need to come up with a way of mounting them - thinking of some Q-bond (superglue with metal filings basically) to glue the standoffs to the perspex and then bolting it from inside.

Also, I was struggling with a way to fasten the disk that's going to swivel, until someone had the ingenious idea of mounting it with a magnet! So I'm going to use some neodymium magnets to hold the disk in place when closed

A quick view of the hardware that will go inside of the cube. Don't mind the totally useless cardboard cutout at the top, it will be made of 3mm clear perspex and the design will be slightly altered - more material to give a stronger piece. Also, you can see a slot that will fit over the network card to hold it in place - it will be bent and fitted square over the card.


My current thinking is that the hard drives will be secured by angled aluminium on both sides of the 5mm perspex sheet. I think I will ultimately only use one 1TB SATA drive, but it helps to plan for expansion and for the time being I'll use the two 320GB IDE drives.

Very nice and compact. I do appreciate all the little details, like the slot to hold the expansion card. That shows you are planning and thinking ahead!

Yeah, I originally weren't going to make a top sheet, instead mounting the fan directly on the inside of the cube, but this way I only have to worry about one side being mounted to the cube and it also makes it easier to assemble the cube. Also, I noticed the network card was fitting tightly in the slot yet it moved quite a bit from side to side (probably up to 10degrees or so ) so it needed to be stabilized.

And then, the reason I didn't get far with the actual building today - installing ubuntu and setting it up just as I need it. Right screen is the cube, left is my i7 (which is playing music mostly) and the laptop is used for command searching... I actually grabbed the wrong keyboard or mouse a couple of times... I must say I struggled a bit with installing Jaunty on a software RAID0 volume, but I pulled through in the end


A sneak peak at the hard drive mounts I've started to make... The other mounts are going to be extended with thick aluminium bar stock and then screws will be threaded through the perspex into the other aluminium bottom pieces (hard to describe it - will be easy to see afterwards). It might be overkill for just mounting some drives, but I thought while I was busy I might as well do it properly :toast:

There's no such thing as overkill! It's the only way to be sure you won't have to redo anything.

I guess you're right! I'm pretty sure those mounts won't ever break though, they are 3mm thick angled aluminium

So, today I didn't get to spend a lot of time on the project, but did manage to drill all the mounting holes and also make the top perspex plate. Here is the template I drew first


Drilling the pilot holes - there's a whole lot of them


Then, after I drilled all the holes, cut the spaces in between with the jigsaw and spent a little (or a lot) time with filing everything neat, this is what I had left. I still need to drill the fan mounting holes though.


The middle plate after drilling all the mounting holes. There are 4 sets of 4 to enable basically any mounting position.


Now I'm working on mounting the (orange) disks and playing around with a way to make the LED light strips...

You're not kidding. That is a whole lot of holes!