The 'deep-thought' casemod

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Created by: tnnPublished 2000-11-03 12:36:07, modified to past tense 2004-05-13 22:45:13

Back in the days when casemodding was still quite unheard of I got a crazy idea: How about painting the computer and stuffing it with tons of blinking LEDs? Would it be as cool as I thought it would be? See for yourself ... Update: This computer doesn't exist anymore, neither does the original mod. However, some people on the 'net actually managed to build LED infested boxes of their own(!).

The paint job

The color was a very dark, purple metallic. It looked better in reality than in those pics. The paint job isn't that interesting, first I polished the case with sandpaper(phew, next time i'll use a machine!) to get rid of the standard PC gray. Then I sprayed the case with color grounding, color and a layer of laquer. Make sure you let the color dry before applying a new layer. Another thing you shouldn't forget is to remove all details, buttons, LED windows etc before painting. Finally I waxed it with standard furniture polish.

The blue LEDs

I changed all front LEDs to blue(430nm) ones. The CD-R was a bit tricky as it is packed with surface mounted components and I have a rather clumsy 25W soldering iron. The photo where all LEDs are lit was a bit tricky as well, as it involved reading from 2 cds, formating a floppy, accessing the harddrive and pushing a trigger at once.

The red LEDs

The "chaser" was made of 64 LEDs(EL53, 625nm wavelength, 5mm diam., wide-angle 120 deg made by Everlight). The LEDs are individually programmable; they can be programmed to move in any pattern or animation sequence desired. The LEDs were wired to some electronics, which were wired to the PC parallel-port. Power was drawn from the ATX power supply +5V connector. Fully lit the array used 0.9 Amps(about 5W). For more info, see below ...

More info in the electronics

The final circuit PDF and the "led" program(including source code) that I used to drive the LEDs can be downloaded here. Make sure you read the

readme.txt

file. There's almost no documentation, as I didn't expect anyone else would be stupid enough to do this to their box ;) If you want to ask me about anything my email address is tnn _ at netilium dot org". Replace "at" with "@", "dot" with "." and remove the "_". (to stop spambots).

More pictures