The "Cool Cube"
By Travis Hydzik, Perth, Australia
Posted on March 9, 2005
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Initially it was planned to build a custom PWM fan controller, but instead a pre built floppy bay rheobus was bought due to being so cheap, and saving a lot of trouble. One problem was due to thicker perspex being used the original capacitors were in the way, so they were desoldered and new capacitors were soldered onto the back of the PCB.

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One feature of the rheobus are the lighted rings around the knobs that change intensity proportional to the fan speed. This feature was kept and copied onto the power/reset buttons adding red lighted rings around them. The red and blue LEDs would match the cold cathodes. The power/reset buttons were some nice looking small buttons with black heads, and to add the red lighting effect some red super bright LEDs were used.

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Clear perspex was painted black, except for the rings around the buttons which was masked to allow the LEDs to shine through.

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The painted perspex was attached to the rest of the back face similar to the rest of the fans. The rheobus and LEDs were then hot glued to the back.

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Cool interior shot before all the wiring starts to make things messy.

The way the fans had been implemented were the front, left and right faces were blowing in and the back and top were blowing out. This worked out to be a 12 to 6 ratio respectively, ideally the same number of fans should be blowing in and out, but it was thought it would just be too annoying having them constantly blowing at you.

Internals

The power supply which was chosen to power the beast was a little plug in board that didn't take up any extra height on the motherboard, yet was still a decent 200 Watts.

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A red and blue lighting effect was chosen for the case, due to space restrictions mini cold cathodes would only fit and it was decided that to add one to each of the the four vertical edges alternating from blue to red. From the same shop a silver rounded IDE cable was bought, for better airflow of course ; )

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The goodies.

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