ITS DUSTiN TIMEE!!!! Yee HaAAAw!

So here's some beginnings...

Got the mobo thrown precisely into the tin for the pic, the panel to the left I'm thinking of making the front panel out of. To the right there is an old disused docking station, that I'm thinking of robbing of it's section of ports there and wiring all those to headers, instead of taking apart all the headers on card brackets and mounting those. Then down below that we have the real fake imitation marble formica (Genuine article!) that I might be using for side panels. IDK if you can see the outside of the tin is kinda gold, so might actually tie in well.

(Gah, dunno what makes it decide which way round to post the pic, mentally rotate 90 deg anticlockwise, it was all the right way up in my editors.)

PSU only seems to fit in one place... this is with the keyboard connector to the rear. Ignore the green board on the I/O strip, that would come off. I'd be okay with the I/O on the side, but it's got the VGA at the front and the PS/2 mouse at the back which is just wrong. Maybe I want the kb coming out the front, the I/O on the left, then ps/2 is forward and vga to rear, and the PSU will flip over and the wire won't be across the center of the board. However, this puts the CPU more under the floppy, which means a heatsink rethink maybe... unless it still has a cm or so above a low profile fan. Got a slightly shorter sink, but that would need more fan methinks, so might not save height.

This psu is 65*75*140 (65W)

5V - 10A

Thanks. Current one is 65*80*170 approx, so possibly not worth a purchase for the 30mm in length saving, which isn't really the dimension where it would matter much.

I used to have something about 30mm deep and 120mm square, think it had AT connector, think it was around 120W. Problem with that one is, I can't even remember if it came to this house or not, or whether it was discarded 1, 2 or 3 moves ago. That was probably by Asetec or HiPro who seem to do all the strange ones.

Been playing some more three dimensional Tetris.... I've gone cold on having the ports on the side, it keeps it from slotting into space on a shelf between other systems etc and staying usable. Ideally the sides should be completely clean. It looks however, that if I want an optical drive though, that that is the only place to put one. But having the optical blocked in doesn't stop you using the computer at all, like having the vga and ps/2 ports cut off would. Optical started to feel more necessary when I remembered that all the DVD players in the house have issues and there's nothing I can hook up to a TV if I want to watch DVDs... unless I build this like that. One has a VGA port, or the SiS chipset might work with a VGA TV convertor published online. However, in the interests of getting anything at all done on this any time soon, the optical might have to be a retrofit, at least as far as having it hooked up goes, as I am unsure whether I want to build or buy interface.

According to calculations from specs, it seems that a mendocino celeron would want upwards of 8 Amps out of the 5 gvolts with assumed 70% conversion loss, whereas the coppermine 700 CC0 stepping would want a mere 5. So 25W for that, 10W for chipset, 5W each of 3 drives... about 50W of heat I need to dump. I hope a 60mm fan pushing and the PSU pulling will do that, because that's about all there is room for. Back panel I will have PSU out one side, i/o strip sawn in half and stacked in the middle, 60mm fan the other side.

Floppy barely fits alongside the PSU and might obstruct fan slightly, which I think I can get away with for 2 reasons, i) it's sucking and fans tend to suck from the middle and blow out the tips, kinda work half in centrifugal mode. So flow restriction is probably less than the percent of area covered on outer parts of fan. ii) Only running PSU at about a quarter capacity it seems so it should cope. Hope the PSU will start though, floppy, laptop drives only seem to be pulling on 5v, as it seems the board will be, so barely anything on 12, and I've got several ATX 2.0 where I need an old HDD plugged in to draw an amp on 12V so they'll fire up when I'm using mainly 5V. Didn't check this one yet.

Might be wanting to hunt through my entire lot of floppies for the shortest one. Know I had one or two that were nearly square. Winner at the moment is the ALPS faceless horror. This ain't all bad, because it will fit right to the top of the front panel and then have slot and buttonhole cut out. Whereas drive with faceplate would have to sit 5mm lower, which gets in the way more inside. Lot to get on front panel too, power and reset buttons, blinkenlights, front USB, front audio (and game probably) and possibly laptop speakers. I have an urge to have built in basic noise throwers. Having speakers clutter up the desk seems so unnecessary most of the time, they get in the way and fall over, you either get big speakers that don't do that, or forget the whole idea. Probably then I want a tiny audio amp and a volume knob. I might take the cones out of a stupid set of "walkman" speakers, that have triangular cases, and those stupid things are always falling all over, useless design.

CPU sink may be a bit overkill if it's only gonna be 15W and is okay up to 80c. Will look at my smaller ones. I want something that pushes air out the side though because mosfets are right there. Need a thick or copper insert base though because there's no heatspreader on a coppermine.

Found a formula that says, CFM = (3.16 x Watts) / temperature delta in F so if I pick a 50 F temperature delta which is about 35C then bare minimum CFM is 3.16 coz the 50s cancel, that's STP sealevel though, so Trailer Park Boys "Worst case Ontario" would prolly need about 5CFM .. so I'll try for about 10 for a Bill Gates "ought to be enough for anyone"

My gut feels on sinks aren't well calibrated to celerons, so I looked up K6-2s and it uses/radiates less than a 350, so whereas I was thinking double the speed, double the sink, I can use one I'd feel happy using on a K6-2-350 I guess.

I have 3 60mm fans to hand, two that look too weak and one that looks too loud, and they're all stickerless, so no looking up specs. ( I just want a "normal" one dammit, about 10mm, not 5, 7 or 15) So I "went shopping" in my basement for 60mms, didn't got none where I looked. However, I spot a box "misc PSU" yah, and they were very misc. So it seems I am not good at measuring things in my head that I last saw 15 years ago... the "120mm square 30mm deep" PSU is there, apart from it is 125*165*45 and puts out a whole 55W, only 7A on the 5V and the 3.3V has to come out of that too because this is AT not ATX (Board has dual power sockets in case that wasn't clear and I didn't mention it.) So that one looks like a candidate for my <486sx in a biscuit tin build. The other is a more promising 13A on 5V and 70*105*155... it miiiight be an alternative to the TFX unit. Will play around tomorrow.

Edit: Just thunk, once upon a time, I got a Volcano 7 with a thermal speed control harness, whatever happened to that??? Could use the harness to tame the fat looking 60mm which prolly pushes 30cfm at a scream. (I know I could drop the volts on it, but it's hard to know your CFM and whether it has a speck of pressure to do any real shoving once you get off the spec sheet, at least with a thermistor it would ramp up speed if it was running too slow to keep things cool)

I went to bed and I was thinking "I bet ppl are wondering why I don't just plug the fan in the system fan header and let it control it"... well, several reasons, first being this one is a 2 wire fan with a molex on it... second being that this board is from the era of system/temp management "almost working some of the time" and that's not just PC Chips, took BIOS programmers, motherboard makers, and system integrators a couple of years to get it right.... third being that this is a very crowded system, can't see where the board temperature sensors are, and there's a high possibility they will get trapped in a hot zone or a cool zone with poor circulation, so will not respond in the desirable way.

I'd imagine if it gets too hot Dustin will end up in the dust bin.

Scored low on that session of 3D Tetris, I didn't think that PSU would help much and it won't. If it was all I had I could make it work with a whole new set of compromises, just a bit of a pity, as it became apparent I'm not using much of the potential of the TFX unit, so woulda been good to save that for a build that needed more of it. However, TFX supplies seem to turn up cheapish in surplus, so I could get another one later if I think of something I really wanna do with it.

Heh, there's some real clowns on classified platforms these days, just checked locally to see if anyone had any fans that I was happier about than my "stock". Some dude was selling a P4 heatsink "Brand New!" and in pic you could see the thing was caked with dust. Yup, I believe ya buddy. 🤣 Though I checked up on one of the "too slim" fans and it's supposed to do 31cfm at 4800 RPM, so that's a screamer I think, I'll put power to it, see what I think, seems fans are a "can't judge book by it's cover" thing because I saw another fan that looks like the "too fat" one, that was said to be a 2200 RPM "barely audible" one, hah.

Well the brakes got slammed on here when I had to so some pressing household maintenance and repairs. Then I was supposed to be getting the old dining room table in the basement work area, so prepped for that, but the replacement dining room table is on hold, so that's all frozen. Work area not very functional until that happens, not that I need to do anything real heavy duty, just would have been easier and probably easier to photograph more of the progress.

Anyway, trying to do what meddling I can with this still. Trying to remember where I got to with the CPU compatibility. Coppermine celeron works in slotket, not in socket which is PPGA, so was down a rabbit hole figuring what changes required for an already half compatible PPGA to FCPGA mod. I think I figured I only needed to insulate or remove a pin. Might have to re-brain that from scratch now, I lost the thread.

Then where I got to mechanically was a shit or get off the pot moment. Things need to be cut to confirm alignment of other things and allow infill and bracing parts to be made. Or in other words I need to quit fu..fooling around with layout and commit. But, I think I need to get the floppy drive supported, so I will build a frame to dangle that. Then I need to insulate the bottom of the tin with a thin sheet of some kind of plastic, since the motherboard will be super close, and figure out if the standoffs will push my PSU higher than that front panel before I cut the sides.

The sides I think will sit flush with the sides of the tin... I have some plywood plant stakes from the dollar store, they are quite nice plywood for being so cheap, not cabinet grade but good stuff for small models and hackery. Anyway, those are just the same depth as the rolled over edge on the tin. So two sides of the tin will get those glued in, trying to decide on hotglue or epoxy. Epoxy sounds more rugged, but tin flex might pop it off. Then I can put in a backing plate to those to affix the side panels to. Not sure if I'm gluing or screwing those at the moment. The front has pegs on the bottom and I've got these blocks with holes in that can locate those, when glued or screwed into the tin, but I need corner brackets or something to tie it to the sides. Then when that's all in place I can get the back panel layout done up.

Ugh, forgot I only have one set of cables for the two motherboards, so gotta bleep out the wiring on the headers and make the back panel header assembly, boring task. Also need to confirm I actually have the right headers for serial etc, not sure this set all came with a board or whether I pieced it together way back. Then I have to find a 15 pin for the game port and some decent 3.5mm jacks... those have not got brought together yet. Nor actually do I have IDC header cables organised. I think I was planning on cutting up IDE cables, each end should give me two motherboard plugs, have to cut them a pin or two too long, then notch the shell and the backplate deally, so that I can twist tie them together (Because they'll only have a clip at one end)

So, this post really me trying to brain dump before I forget more of where I was going and organise for the next push...

Good news everyone...

I forgot I had some "dupont cable" hookup cables with female ends, I ordered a "set" ages ago to get the ones with pins on the ends for another project, forgot I don't require the socket ended ones.. so those will make header hookup easier.

Yard sales gifted me a speaker today that will be cool for the PC speaker, it looks a bit like a tweeter type though, so gotta check it actually has some lower treble and bass response. It's not piezo super high range though, still a coil type. Might need a resistor in line with it for current limiting, don't wanna cook the header. I wanna have PC speaker sounding right(ish.. gooder is betterer) for older games.

Well that took me down a rabbithole, it is a tweeter, a dome tweeter, expected frequency from ~1500 hz up... however, they don't not make noise below that, it's a curve from ~60dB at about 100hz to ~90dB where they "start" at 1500... However, bad low range response is because they ain't got much cone movement to make the air wiggle harder... but I assume that they are tested at near maximum rated output levels, like a few dozen watts... so if you were starting at low output, would there be a point where cone wiggled as hard as it could at low frequency, so more power didn't make it go harder, and then as you turned up power see the output curve form?? .... All I really want to know is if at low low power the third or half watt from the squeaker header, is it just as loud as any other tiny coned speaker at 100hz or so, which has equally limited cone movement, and not excessively much louder at higher frequency?? .. Or to put it another way.. I'm trying to use a small speaker, of around the same size of this one, at less than a watt, so thumpy bass ain't gonna happen, but is it any particularly MORE terrible than a generic 1.5" speaker or about the same?

Edit: Hah harrrr.... That all turned out to be academic, it's too much of a fatarse. The back end of it fouls the DIMM slots when it's low enough to clear the floppy drive. I think I'm gonna end up with one stuck asymmetrically on the side or something. Either that or front left corner facing skywards maybe. Front panel just got to be high rent, got too much else to get on there.

To quote the actual star of Supernatural 😉 Bobby Singer "Balls!" ... the pieces of nailing strip type stuff I thought I was gonna use to make the frame for the floppy are trapped behind stuff moved awaiting the "new" bench, so can't get at them until I get a hand to move a shelf unit back. Dunno whether to wait until the "Great table move" finally happens or press on with alternative materials, or to try and fish some out with a "grabber" stick.

Edit: Now I'm looking for a small small speaker, I have realised that the quick way to tell the difference between a crappy modem and a decent modem is whether it has a speaker on or not... Going like, "Oh, that's ones got one..... nope don't wanna destroy that one it's a US robotics..... now heres a shitty winmodem... but no speaker...".. having similar luck trying to find something to take a 15 pin for the gameport off, you'd think something theoretically more oddball like the high density VGA 15pin would be more trouble, nope, got more than 3 choices for that.

Edit2: Still nothing turning up to give the floppy legs.. I was looking at a trashed case, well the ~45% left of it, but it didn't really have convenient shapes in it. I guess I could make a card template and just cut the thing in one piece from the sheetmetal on the bottom, still might. However, it just "hits wrong" don't it, if I go "I ran out of cases and made my own, here's how; i) Find a case you don't need and cut this critical bit out of it...." 🤣 This one I can't technically call a curb find because it was suspended 3ft above the curb by the bank of snow it was embedded in. It was in a condition that antiquarian booksellers might call "foxed" but more like it was beared and wolfed too, I think it might have been run over once before the snowplow hit it. Anyway, it was missing panels and twisted out of shape, only 70% of a case when I found it. Since then it donated pieces to two 95% complete cases, it's slot brackets holdy thing to one, and it's PSU mounting area to another. (Some weird case that had a removable PSU mounting plate or some crap, to make it "easier" to mount your PSU by first having to screw it to the plate and then having to screw the plate to the case??? I dunno, it was missing from the case, had to make one.) .... and it's motherboard tray is pretty good still and might make it's home in another project sometime... anyway, it would've needed a ton of work and new metal to turn it into a functional but inevitably still fugly case, so it got cannibalized.

Hmmph, my measurements or jury rigging for fit were off by a tad... or maybe I'll blame it on tolerance stacking, yeah that sounds like an engineering term for an act of god, but more technical, so tolerance stacking made it so the floppy is gonna be a quarter inch off center. OCD hell. I can either cut the floppy slot a quarter inch longer on one side, so the slot is centered, or I could fudge the front panel sideways by a quarter inch, so it's centered on the panel, but the panel is off by a quarter inch. But BW, you still ain't got the floppy drive nailed in...

I have a cunning plan </Baldrick> ...

So, what I was gonna do was have a gangly legged strap across for the floppy to dangle on, now weight wise this should have been fine, but I began thinking about torsion from hammering that button.... yeah, need fore and aft support, or a very rigid "strap". Could have bracketed it to the lid maybe, but want lid fixed to sides. Seemed like I'd have to train one of those tiny monkeys to assemble it from the inside. IDK maybe there's a way to work that, I'll call it plan B if this goes wrong. So I began thinking about a wider bit of material, spanning two or more of the fixing holes... something like a M where the dip in the middle is the tray where the floppy sits, and the "legs" sit on the bottom of the tin, run up the sides, can be used for side panel attachment, go over the top of the PSU one side, will keep the arse end of that from moving too. So I need about 19" of metal that's easily worked in a wide strip hmmm... moAr tins! .. coffee tin/can.. should be rigid enough at few inches wide, and it's ribbed for pleasure for strength. So found one I had near enough right length for full length of floppy, will try and keep the rims on it, so no wrist slashing edge. Cut bottom and top ring out with a canopener, keeping bottom just in case, dunno if it will make the fill in panel at the back, maybe TOO ribbed. Think I'll cut it straight up the seam then get a 2 or 3" wide piece of wood and stand on it inside the curve to flatten it out. (Plank that reaches at least a human foot width each side of can to stand on) It was a 700g shortarse can BTW, not a 1Kg/2 pounder...

So, bending to be done, what do you do, build yourself a shit-arse metal brake... there it is 1st pic, couple of bits of perforated angle bolted together... you could maybe saw up a bed rail and drill a couple of holes in it, or improvise with a large vise and pieces of hard wood... only good for real thin steel or slightly thicker aluminum... I could even feel this flexing as I was using it on the thin tin steel ...

Then the result, it's getting there, needs a bit of tweaking but everything is in more or less the right place, add fasteners and it will be quite rigid methinks...