Filling up my empty drive bay with some fans.

Hello all, just joined this site. Anyway, I decided that my 1 red led fan on the front of my case wasn't enough looks-wise, so I decided to put 3 40mm fans in my empty drive bay. Still a work in progress, and not sure if I'm going with this setup or if I'm going to redo it, but here's what I have so far. Also plan on running the power for the lights independently from the fans in a fan controller so I can adjust the brightness and speed separately.

Here is my first version, with the leds and fans running off of the same power:

Rewired it a bit for separate power since then, but no pics yet. Waiting on my fan controller to get in so I can get everything installed. Also, in case anyone was wondering, my case is a Rosewill Blackbone.
Sorry if this thread is in the wrong place, I'm just a noob feeling my way around these parts lol.

Not a bad start. 40mm are a tad on the noisy side though. Hope you'll be running them well below full speed.

I will. Don't really need more airflow in my case, so I'm going to run them just fast enough to scatter the light properly.

Now this I want to see in a case

Fan controller should be here Monday, so should have some pics of it installed sometime next week. Ordered some different fans that I think will work a bit better, and some more LEDs, so I'm going to make a new one when I get everything. The new fans won't be here for a few weeks as they are coming from China, so going to run this setup for a bit. Also, I wish that this was still available, the mesh matches perfectly to my case. And I wouldn't have to worry about disconnecting the fans whenever I take the face plate off.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I'm also adding an SD card reader to this. I took a cheap usb card reader and soldered a usb cable to it to plug into a usb port inside the case so that I can get rid of the ugly multi-card reader that I have. I only use SD cards, so I don't need all of that extra stuff on it.

Didn't feel like waiting, so I hooked up a molex 4-pin to the wires, with the LEDs running off of the 5v side and test fit it in the case. Pics:
In the dark

In the light

I don't really care for all of the light bleeding out from between the fans, so when I get my new fans, I think I'm going to wrap the outside of them in electrical tape so the only light you see is from the blades. Can't do that with the ones I have, because they are just a faceplate with "arms" holding the fan, whereas my new fans that are coming are like a complete box around the blades, like a regular computer fan. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here are the fans that I have:

and the new ones I'm waiting on:

That looks awesome.

Looks good! I kinda like the bleed through effect of the LEDs.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheMainMan

Looks good! I kinda like the bleed through effect of the LEDs.

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Agreed, all in all the case looks pretty awesome as it is right now

New fans didn't work. The blades have a frosted look to them, and they diffuse the light way too much. So looks like I'm using the original setup. The only thing is that the LEDs look orange now :? Maybe I put too much power through them when testing. Looks like I may have to replace the LEDs and get some more powerful resistors. I have a question for anyone that has more electronics knowledge than I do: Can I just add another 470 ohm resistor to the positive wire powering the LEDs? I have 6 sets of 2 LEDs (2 per fan) wired in series with a 470 ohm 1/2 watt resistor on each. Or do you guys think that I should just redo the LEDs from scratch with bigger resistors? Oh, and the LEDs are 1.8v 20mA each. Thanks all for the help and feedback.

http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz
http://ledcalc.com/

Try one of those.

Looking cool dude!

Also, you might be able to pop off the little C clip holding the actual shaft and fan rotor to the housing (behind the fans sticker on the back), and replace them over to the other fans housing, if that's the look you were going for but with the other fans housing.

just really depends on the length of the drive shaft and where that little C clip rests in =)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Twigsoffury

Looking cool dude!

Also, you might be able to pop off the little C clip holding the actual shaft and fan rotor to the housing (behind the fans sticker on the back), and replace them over to the other fans housing, if that's the look you were going for but with the other fans housing.

just really depends on the length of the drive shaft and where that little C clip rests in =)

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I was going to try to do that, but I just ended up ordering some more of the first kind of fans. Where the screw holes are on the frosted looking ones the LEDs wouldn't have been able to be put in the right place. I guess there's a reason why there aren't any 40mm LED fans with the lights shining on the blades like the bigger ones lol. I ended up not mounting the fans directly to the mesh blank. Instead, I modified one of these:

Everything is done on it, just waiting for a replacement 3.5" drive blank to fill in the empty hole on my faceplate. Decided to remove the multi-card reader from the bay, and can't find the cover anywhere lol. Don't want to show off my finished (for now) computer with a gaping hole on the front lol. But, here are some teasers:
You can see my backwards mounted fan controller in the open drive bay to control the LEDs in the first pic.