Building the computer box

I went to Merten at Münster (good old-fashioned electronics shop) and bought a power meter (at EUR32,- pretty expensive, but with a couple of neat features), an experiment board for the basic stamp, and some struts for mounting the mainboard. The "pin-plugs" I bought are way too big for the USB/COM headers on the board.

Found that power consumption is 20W with WLAN. Not bad! Under full CPU load this goes up to 27W. The TV card uses 7W on its own. The laptop, BTW, uses 60W when playing a movie. Whopper!

Took me a long time to think of just how to build the box, and how to fix the struts to the box. Furthermore I don't yet how to mount the harddisk. I'm not quite happy with the design; bending rather long sheets of metal with no knowledge or special tools just results in ugly wavy and round "corners". Lots of sawing with the manual jig saw, too; at the end used the power saw, and: the cuts look quite nice with the new metal blade.

Fiddled around with struts that I cut and shortened and modified to attach the main board and the DC-converter to the aluminum "box" (base plate with sides bent up). I should have stuck with the original idea (just a base plate, and wood for the rest), and might just go back to that when I build the wooden enclosure. The general problems are stability, cooling, water proofing, and wiring.

Replaced the 40 wire IDE cable with a 80 wire cable - seems to work. Found the ATX connector cable stands 8cm high (!) when plugged into the DC-converter, and the cable is very stiff :-( Will probably solder out the connector, cut off the plug from the cable, and solder the connector cable directly onto the DC-converter. The converter, BTW, does directly plug into the main board, but it interferes with the PCI slot then. Clever design, not.

Installed more software, and studied the R&G epoxy catalog that arrived today (resins, glas fiber fabric, dyes).