{"id":99,"date":"2011-01-26T20:37:32","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T04:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/?p=99"},"modified":"2025-03-18T14:26:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T22:26:19","slug":"an-evening-of-soldering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/2011\/01\/26\/an-evening-of-soldering\/","title":{"rendered":"An Evening of Soldering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Usually, when you buy a computer case it comes with all the necessary wires and connectors to hook up everything to the motherboard.\u00a0 Well, in my case (haha), I’m making a custom case.\u00a0 No wires or connectors included, so I have to make them all.\u00a0 So I spent an evening putting a bunch of stuff together.<\/p>\n

First off, the power switch cable.\u00a0 There’s a header on the motherboard to connect the power switch, so I need 2 wires to connect to 2 of the pins.\u00a0 Since I already have a tool to crimp such style female connectors, that’s the way I went.\u00a0 I was going to use a pre-made 2-pin connector (sort of like a jumper, but not connected) but I wasn’t able to find any.\u00a0 Here is the female connector by itself:<\/p>\n

\"Header<\/a><\/p>\n

So, a wire goes in and then gets crimped on.\u00a0 My obsessive-compulsive tendencies had me also sealing the deal with a bit of solder:<\/p>\n

\"Header<\/a><\/p>\n

Next, I put some heat shrink tubing on.\u00a0 Since these pins will be close to each other, this insulates them from accidentally touching each other:<\/p>\n

\"Heat<\/a><\/p>\n

I did this to 2 wires.\u00a0 And I also had the great idea to put the 2 wires together as one unit.\u00a0 But how? I grabbed one of the 3-pin headers I got for the fans, and put the 2 wires on 2 pins.\u00a0 This held them in place while I covered them in hot glue to fix them together:<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a><\/p>\n

Perfect!\u00a0 They were now stuck together with exactly the correct spacing! One final thing left: shave off the excess hot glue with a razor blade so that the connector will fit next to others, and place a heat shrink tubing around the whole thing.\u00a0 Now, I used a simple candle to shrink the tubing.\u00a0 Little did I realize at the time that heat is also what melts hot glue.\u00a0 So as soon as I started shrinking the tubing, the hot glue holding the connectors in place melted, and the heat shrink tubing squeezed them together.\u00a0 Some fast action getting the scissors in between the 2 and then heating some more and placing back on the fan header managed to salvage them, although they’re not quite perfectly straight anymore.\u00a0 Oh well, they fit on nicely at least.\u00a0 Here’s the final wire:<\/p>\n

\"Completed<\/a><\/p>\n

The other ends of the wire will connect to the NES power switch.\u00a0 The NES switch stays in when you push it and keeps the connection.\u00a0 I’ll have to modify it by removing a small piece so it is the same as the Reset switch because this is how current motherboards work.\u00a0 You push the button once, and it comes back out.<\/p>\n

The motherboard also has a header for a power indicator LED, so I also need to make wires for this.\u00a0 This time, I think I’ll just leave them separate and connect the 2 wires separately instead of trying to fuse them together like this with the correct spacing.<\/p>\n

Next up, the fans.\u00a0 The fans have 3 pin headers – one is power +, another power -, and the last is for the motherboard to sense the RPMs and report the speed (for variable speed fans).\u00a0 The motherboard can also vary the speed through a fourth pin based on temperature, but these fans don’t have that feature.\u00a0 Also included with the fans is an adapter to hook the fan straight up to the power supply through a molex connector (the same one used to connect power to the old style hard drives and DVD drives, etc.).\u00a0 The trouble is, the motherboard only has a connector for one fan, and the power supply only has 1 molex connector.\u00a0 Now, I could buy a few molex splitters, but these are somewhat bulky (almost an inch square) and the splitters would add a couple inches of wiring each, making a big mess of wires and bulky connectors inside an already space-limited case.<\/p>\n

So, I made a custom wiring harness for the fans.\u00a0 On one end, it hooks up to the molex connector to get power straight from the power supply.\u00a0 Then, it splits out into 3 very short fan connector wires, and also has another molex connector, so I don’t lose that by connecting up the fans.\u00a0 This way I can use it if I ever decide to add a DVD or Blu-ray drive.\u00a0 And, the wires I used are very short so there won’t be a big mess.\u00a0 Because I don’t need speed sensing, I only needed to connect 2 wires to each fan for power.\u00a0 Here’s the final harness:<\/p>\n

\"Fan<\/a><\/p>\n

I tried hooking it up, and everything works!\u00a0 Woo hoo!<\/p>\n

On another, unrelated note, Katamari Damacy was mentioned again in a recent xkcd comic<\/a>.\u00a0 So I had to see about a PlayStation 2 emulator.\u00a0 Sure enough, there is one, and Katamari Damacy played great at 800×600 resolution!\u00a0 I played through the first 4 levels or so.\u00a0 Now, I’ll have to see if my brother still has all his old PS2 games and wants to give them to me.<\/p>\n

I never got too much into the PlayStation side of games, and as such I don’t really know of enough good games I like to want to get the emulators.\u00a0 The emulators I’ve chosen are pretty much for the games I remember playing.\u00a0 I’ll have to go through my brother’s PS1 and PS2 collection to see if there’s anything there I want to put on the CES.<\/p>\n

The next logical step I believe is to start trying to put this stuff into the NES; figuring out where everything will go and how it will be mounted.\u00a0 Here we go . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Usually, when you buy a computer case it comes with all the necessary wires and connectors to hook up everything to the motherboard.\u00a0 Well, in my case (haha), I’m making a custom case.\u00a0 No wires or connectors included, so I have to make them all.\u00a0 So I spent an evening putting a bunch of stuff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertbyam.com\/ces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}