Really comming along very well, good work.
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Really comming along very well, good work.
Thanks :)
I made the second LED-Strip today. Because of the experience from the last one I didn't screw up as much so this one was done a lot faster ;)
Still took me a few hours, even if those things sure don't look like it, but soldering all those LED's together and squeezing them in there is quite a bit of work. Hopefully, I'll do the last one tomorrow and then I'm finished with this part of the lightning system. As for the other one, I'm pretty sure by now that my controller is broken. I'll send it to a friend who has the same one tomorrow and then hopefully he can tell me whether its broken or not.
Now, pictures:
Somehow, it looks more professional with black wires:
And these are the two finished Strips. The cable lengths vary because I'm going to put them in different spots in the case and I don't want to make a mess with all the cables. There's a LOT of those going in the case already, I hope I'll manage to make it look clean somehow. I'm optimistic though, because the Cosmos is awesome in terms of cable management :)
LED's + long exposure = a lot of fun ;)
looks sweet.. nice work...
Good news! I think I found a solution for my spreading-the-light-behind-the-logo problem. But first, pics of todays progress (which isn't much).
I didn't feel like building another LED strip today, but no problem, theres plenty of other stuff to do, mostly little things.
I prepared the top part today. First, the Cosmos logo had to go because I'm going for a clean look. I used sandpaper to grind it off which was a bit painful because I had to ruin the brand new glossy black plastic but it's going to get painted over later, so really, who cares. I would have sanded it before painting anyway.
Then I ripped off this aluminum faceplate which was kind of in my way because I had to make the hole for the reset switch a bit bigger. Again, it looked nice, but since I'm going to paint everything it doesn't make a difference so I didn't even try not to ruin it while getting it off ;)
Then I modified the holes so that these two buttons would fit in to replace the regular ones, I just had to make them bigger because they were already in the perfect position:
I still had those lying around anyway and they look a LOT better than the stock ones from the cosmos which feel kind of cheap. I think I'm going to paint them black like the rest, I don't want them to stand out too much. I don't really need a reset switch and think they are pointless these days (why not just press the power button?) but I had 2 holes and 2 buttons so why not.
I'm also going to put two little switches in those two holes that are meant for the headphone/mic connectors. My soundcard doesn't support those extension cables anway so there's no reason to leave them there. The switches are going to switch the UV-CCFLs and the rgb-controller on and off.
I also started sleeving the first cables. I'm not going to sleeve everything, because that's just too expensive and would also be pointless because I'm going to hide most of the cables as good as I can. I don't see a point in sleeving a crapload of cables that nobody is going to see anyway. I'm only going to sleeve the ones that stand out, or in other words, that aren't black. Like this cable for the E-Sata connector in the top. I also sleeved the Power/Reset Switch and Status-LED cables and I'm probably going to sleeve the ATX connector so it's completely black, as well as the GPU connector and the other Sata cables.
Now, the interesting part, I think I found a way to make the logo glow in a very awesome way, even better than the white plexi I had originally planned to use.
I still had this old keyboard (a Saitek Eclipse) which has backlit keys lying around (or used to have them when it still worked). Since they somehow managed to light up all the keys evenly, I decided to take a look inside. This is what I found:
Not exactly fiber optics, but still perfect for my needs. It's actually just a piece of plexi/acryllic glas which has little dents all over it. Behind that, there's a piece of thin, white plastic. The way it works is pretty simple, you light it up with LED's from the side and the little dents in the surface disperse the light, or at least some of it, in all directions. To put it even simpler, the little dents start glowing ;)
Now this is not exactly what I had in mind (which was a piece of white plexi glowing evenly) but its actually even COOLER.
It has a very cool sci-fi look about it and just looks more interesting than the white plexi. Also, it just _works_. I tried it with one of my LED strips to give you an idea of how it looks:
And with the logo:
It looks a lot better in real life, it was kind of hard to take a decent picture of the effect. There's still a few problems but I think I already know how to solve them. First of all, I don't have a big piece of this stuff that I can use like the plexi. Because there's holes and little knobs in/on it (see second picture), I can't just cut out a piece the size of the logo and put it behind there. I'll have to make several pieces, maybe one for each of the triangles.
The second problem is, it's not nearly as bright as the LED you light it up with, I'd say about 30% of the light is visible in the end. That's not a big problem though, I'll just use more LED's ;)
I think I'll use 8 3mm LED's with 10000mcd, so one for each triangle. That should be plenty to make it bright enough. I can't wait to see this finished :D
Nice, it looks really good.
/\ amen to that :P
I finally finished the last of the 3 LED Strips today. I can't stand LED's anymore, 3 days of soldering this stuff was enough for me.
Well, at least it works and I finally got it over with.
You could try scoring the little dents into the plexi with a bit of scrap metal (knife too sharp), a cross hatch pattern would (should) give an even dispersal.
then line the back of the plexi with tinfoil to keep the light going in the right direction.
possibly.
might be less fiddly cutting then the triangles option.
Don't worry, I already found an easier way :)Quote:
Originally Posted by madd0ct0r
More on that tomorrow.
Got some work done today!
I modified the top part so that the air from the radiator has somewhere to go. I had this planned from the beginning but never got around to it. Well, today was the day.
This area had to go:
10 Minutes later:
And after the usual filing and sanding:
This is the mesh that I'm going to put in:
I used hot glue to make sure it stays where I put it. I have some experience with this kind of mesh from some other mods and it's always a pain in the ass to properly affix this stuff with some reliability. Hot glue seems to be the only thing that REALLY works (except screws obviously, but those are out of the question for my design). It may not be pretty, but it's not like anyone is going to see this from the inside, except you guys of course ;)
As you can see, the hot glue does what it's supposed to. That mesh is going nowhere.
And the final shot:
The mesh is going to get painted too obviously, I think this is one of the first parts I'm going to paint since I don't have to do any more work on this one. I'm not going to paint everything at once, since I don't have the space, and with the number of parts, it's just more comfortable to paint a few things here and there over a few days.
Looking really good. Are your LEDs wired to blink/fade or are you wiring them to a switch so you can manually change the color?
