Raimi war hier

I met my mom today and she was telling me something scary: When I celebrated my 28th birthday some days ago it was 28 years after my dad was 28 when I was born. Now I am 28 and I have neither a wife, a daughter nor a son. Times change or is this just me?

When i took nikita out of service (replaced by livsfare) i had some spare parts which were just too good to be thrown away. Also, Katrin and I wanted to try some case-modding so we started what should become this: The complete set of pictures is here. Here are some details. Rationale:

• Put it in the spare suitcase
• Use leftovers
• Gather tools and experience for other projects
• It should do something useful
• Make it look good
• Let it glow
• Make it orange

The reason for the last two items is this: You can buy lots of case-modding equipment, but only in the standard LED colors red, green, blue and white. Orange is another standard LED color, but there is no case-modding equipment in orange.

The idea

First, there was only the rough idea of the aluminium suitcase. The question was if board and power supply unit would fit. Later we discovered two things: Firstly, the actual mainboard from nikita was bigger then the broken victim-board we used for all tests. Secondly, the suitcase isn't much of aluminium. It's basically chipboard laminated with a shiny metal film. That's why it's so cheap (something like 10 Euro). But it is easy to be dealt with, sawing and rasping is easy.

First steps

The old hardware had to be cleaned because it was growing dust puppies already. The guts of the suitcase were removed and painted orange. The CPU fans and little plastic thingies we tought could carry the mainboard were sprayed orange (which didnt turn out very well).

The Glowing

The most interesting part was to stuff as many orange LEDs into as we could (afford and manage). The building block and limiting factor are LED stripes which we thought would easily carry our normal 5mm LEDs. But we didnt read carefully: Those stripes are meant for SMD LEDs. At least hey came with a collection of suitable SMD resitors. So we ended up drilling 0.8mm holes into the stripes (after some attempts you just know how wide 2.54mm is). One side of the stripes were sprayed orange,too (guess which one).
Then followed some soldering and goofing around (check the gallery). Light is so much fun.
144 LEDs switched like this (4 in a row, all blocks parallel) use up about 13W of power (1.1A at 12V). Yes, this is surpisingly much if you consider that the entire machine runs at 80W (120 when booting).

Putting everything together

A (part of a) peanuts can had to serve as an exhaust pipe for the power supply unit which is glued and screwed inside the case. . The picture to the right shows what carries the board now. M3x25mm screws hold those metal thingies and the board. The socket for the 230V power supply was a little difficult because i wanted it well protected with heat schrink tubing - which of course shrinks while you are soldering. That took me nearly have an evening until i was satisfied with the result.
Then there was a mean surprise: Not only was the dummy board smaller than the real one, it also had the AGP slot at a different spot. That was actually new to me: The AGP slot may be the first one one the board, but it's not neccessarily the first opening in the case. There was another small surprise. A 5mm LED doesnt fit in a 5mm reflector case. There is a small ring that needs to be rasped off. I love this little power tool.
the 4 HDDs are screwed to 2 plexiglass plates which in turn are screwed to the suitcase. Changing a HDD is not easy, but i don't indend to do that anytime soon.

Turning it on

Long story short, eventually we could turn the thing on with this extra cool protected switch (the cap itself costs more than 6 Euros). See the gallery for some more pictures.

Software and Usage

The machine named ctrl-z runs Debian sid. It has two 800 Mhz PIII processors, 768 MB of RAM and 4 HDDs. Two of them have 40GB, the other two are 80GB and 120GB. To make some use of this the 40GB discs are connected as a RAID1 (mirror) array (those are old IBM discs, waiting to fail). Together with the 80GB disc as a RAID0 (stripe) this makes 120GB which in turn is a RAID1 mirror of the 120GB disc. Yes, you can make RAIDs be members of RAIDs in Linux software RAID. Unfortunately the boot-time autorun of the kernel (2.6.14.2) does not detect this correctly, so the RAIDs are assembled with a kernel command line. So this machine serves as a backup device (hence the name). If only wake-on-lan worked, i could do everything automatically. So i have to turn it on manually, but at least this is fun. So, feel free to drop us a note and always keep in mind: safety first. Wear glasses, a helment, gloves, scarf and a jockstrap when working with a Proxxon Micromot.