Mermaid case with programmable lighting

[CrazyLefty]

This is a log of the work-in-progress for my wife's case mod.
This is definitely a team effort, without her ideas the PC would not look as beautiful as it is progressing to be!
We started with a white Fractal Designs Define R2 (the link is for an R4 but nearly identical)
We were looking for a case that would give her a nice big canvas, and in a light color, and this case was perfect.
I really love working in this case, it feels like a luxury car. Your hands are always resting on the dampening material, this soft fabric that pads the inside of the case, a real pleasure to spend a lot of time working in. And with the custom wiring and such, there is a lot of time spent with your hands inside the case. The inside was already white, so no need to re-paint anything, a big plus!

The first step was to design the cut that we were going to make on the side panel.
My wife designed an art-nouveau mermaid underwater scene that was going to resemble stained glass.
We had the side panel water cut, it ended up being a great way to cut it. the side panel has a rubber/corkboard sound dampening material on it, and the water cutter sliced through it beautifully, and left a clean edge on the rubber and metal.

She is going to follow up with some artwork posts and explain more of that process.

 

[jojo69]

oh wow, do you folks have jobs?

 

[CrazyLefty]

We wanted an Intel build, and since we are an Asus-only household, The Sabretooth Z77 board was a great fit! The motherboard shield would allow us to mask the motherboard and allow us to hide it beneath the pretty white case and colored lights and custom sleeving.

I removed the shield, and primed and painted it, as well as all the slot covers, fan covers, and fans.

This pic shows the motherboard and shield/slot covers in place, the HD6850 that needed to be re-worked, the Seasonix X-650 that sticks out, and the RAM installed, 8GB of Mushkin Enhanced Redline. You can also see the custom sleeving colors but i've got some closeups.

We stuck with stock cooling just as long as we needed to, but water was in the near future.

This is a little closeup of the board and some more of the sleeving.

 

[CrazyLefty]

oh wow, do you folks have jobs?

Ha!
Yeah, full time both of us, plus kids. We just make time

 

[CrazyLefty]

We didn't want ugly black wires inside our under-water themed case, so of course we had to custom sleeve it. We chose green white and blue for the sleeving to tie in with the theme.
I sleeved the 8-pin, 24-pin, and header connections.

The red cover for the graphics card stuck out like a sore thumb, but how could we hide that?
Custom cover? Maybe. Paint? YES!

I masked off the fan, the crossfire connector, and the external connectors, then attacked it with white spray paint! I knew the spray paint wasn't conductive, and I really hadn't seen a lot of info on whether or not it was a good idea, so I just went for it! I sprayed the cover, and the backside of the PCB. I didn't see a good way to remove the cover, so there is some red bleeding out from the underside of the cover, but unless you get really up close it isn't really noticable.

You can see more of the wiring here as well.

Now what do we do about that ugly PSU??

 

[CrazyLefty]

Here she is without the panel in place, or without the lights.

 

[CrazyLefty]

We want an underwater theme, and wanted to use lighting to really make that stand out.
I've got some basic understanding of Arduino, so we decided to use a strip of programmable LEDs from Sparkfun
This is a flexible, waterproof strip of individually addressable RGB LEDs. So what makes these different from other LED strips is that we can have each individual LED be any color we want at any time we want, with whatever intensity that we want! This way we could make wave patterns, or my wife could change the colors based on her mood! Since they are controlled through an arduino, we just program the effects that we want. This is easier said than done though!

These are powered through 5V, you can actually run 30 of them right from the arduino bus running through USB, but any more and you would need to inject power from the PSU, but 5V is easy to come by!

Here is the first LED wired to the Teensyduino, since I only need two pins, this worked perfectly, and would be easier to hide away.

The strip can be cut after every two LEDs, but I learned the hard way that they really weren't meant to be re-soldered after this. Maybe with someone with better soldering skills than I could do this, but the flexible circuit board that these are layered on didn't stand up to well to re-soldering. The joints wouldn't hold, so there was a lot of solder-sucking, cleaning, and re-soldering, and it just ate away that the thin etchings.

The final nail in the coffin for this strip was injecting power incorrectly (it was WAY too late at night) I killed half the strip and fried my Teensyduino
So this strip had to be scrapped, it was too bad, I had the wiring for it beautifully done. It was tight, nice corners, fit perfectly in the case. This will be re-created in the next strip, but time was running out and we wanted to bring it to a LAN with the lights in it, so the next lights were really just thrown in, but I was careful to find something that would tolerate soldering a bit more.

I found these and they fit the bill perfectly.

 

[CrazyLefty]

We replaced the stock cooler with an Antec Kuhler 920.

I painted the radiator white, sleeved the fan wires, and wrapped the black tubing in expandable sleving that has a slit running along it so it can be opened, then wrapped around and velcroes back onto itself, and secured the ends at the pump and radiator in black velcro.

You can also the see the lighting here, but just a tease

This pic has all the lights installed as well. The wiring still has to be cleaned up, and the arduino needs to be mounted correctly.
To cover the seasonic PSU, but not void that wonderful 5-year warranty, I made an acrylic wrap for it, and my wife painted it to match the underwater theme.
This pic has only one of the two SSDs installed, you can see the pre-sleeved power connector hanging under the single SSD. Yeah, for once I thought ahead! Mark the calendar

Here is a closeup of one of the 'pixels' and some different colors. Since they are RGB LEDs (meaning the have a Reg, Green, and Blue LED in each 'bulb' we can make any color possible with an RGB combo (hint: all of them!!!)

 

[CrazyLefty]

The power LED was a bright blue, that really didn't fit, so I had to mod it!

I removed the current LED, and needed to carve out a chunk of the front of the case, under the bezel, so i could hot-glue an RGB LED to the plastic casing. Now the power LED can be whatever color we want it to be, and currently just cycles through colors like the rest of the LEDS. The effect is amazing, it came out really well.
And since the USB ports are powered when the PC is off, the lights remain on as long as their is power; sitting in our living room this is a nice touch, its like an always-on night light

 

[faelynn]

I love all things bright and colorful. After building our son's Minecraft case together I started to get ideas about doing faux stained glass work on a piece of acrylic for a new build for myself.

I picked up this "Value Paint Set" at a local art and crafts store. Its a kit including black fake leading to draw your lines with and the glass paints that you would then fill in the spaces after the leading dries.

At first I thought colored acrylic might be really neat. A blue or green maybe. So I tried out some fire on a piece from the minecraft case.

Yuck! The colors don't show through well, the black leading that came with the kit is goopy and sticky and was impossible for me to put down smoothly.

So again, with some clear acrylic and sharpies instead of the goop.

Ah! So much nicer! The paints are thick enough to not flow past where you want them so using a sharpie for lines before worked out just fine.

And I love my sharpies (which if you've seen the Borderlands case, you'd know!)

I ended up using paint sharpies for the final piece as the regular ones didn't seem to hold up well on the acrylic and got streaky very fast

 

[Josephrr]

Not my mod but wow that desk is http://youtu.be/uOjOnRq_57w

 

[faelynn]

It took quite awhile to find a place to cut the side for us, precision was really important for it to come together correctly. A lot of phone calls later and we found a great place H20 Precision willing to cut out what we needed without us having to figure our how to program it into CAD first. It was quite a bit of measuring to get it precise.

So the next step was to trace my outline from my artwork I had done prior. Which was fun and easy. I just love sharpies!

And then the filling. I used a combination of fine brushes and the little 'push stick' that came with the kit.

I was so so happy! It was beautiful!

Here's a photo of the cut side panel on top of the acrylic (I'm just holding it together at this point, I was so excited to see how it looked together)

 

[CrazyLefty]

So the wiring has to be cleaned up, I want to sleeve the wiring for the RGB LEDS after custom fitting the wiring (for the second time!!! grrrr!)

Eventually the graphics card will be updated

Probably one of the more difficult things left to do is to get the LEDs sequenced and get the programmed into the arduino.
I want to create a few zones, like bottom, mid, and top, and left, right, and center, so we can create a wave pattern, that flows from blue to green and all the colors in-between.
I have a vague idea of how to do it, I've written basic software before, its really just a matter of setting aside the time to do it.

This weekend at Maker Faire we picked up 100 more LEDs, and some neat custom controllers from Cool Neon Lighting from Oakland, CA. I even ran into a fellow HardForum and case-modder extra-ordinaire, AND Nolan Bushnell, who pretty much shaped my childhood and definitely even effected my life as an adult!

The developer shield that I picked up adds 4 potentiometers, 2 momentary switches, and 2 2-position switches! The included library has some basic sketches, one that allows three of the potentiometers to act as dials for each of the R, G, and B colors.

These pics really show the color combinations possible with these strips!
You don't even really have to have a pattern or motion, you could have all the LEDs be solid colors, as a replacement for multiple LED strips, and FAR more versatile if you add a controller. And since it is connected to USB, the sketches are easily modified without removing anything, or fiddling around with an SD card or something. Really happy that I stumbled across these, and foresee endless possibilities, not only in case mods, but even around the house!
I also need to make a custom length sleeved USB cable to connect a spare USB header to the arduino, right now it snakes out the back of the case and plugs in on the back panel.
Will post updates as they come

 

[CrazyLefty]

Fractal Design R2 case, custom window and acrylic
Intel i5 3570k (stock for now, HardOC to come)
8GB Mushkin Enhanced Redline RAM
Asus Sabretooth Z77 motherboard
Radeon HD6850 (another soon-to-be replaced part)
Antec Kuhler 920
2x Samsung 830 SSD in RAID-0 (128GB total)
1x 1TB HDD
Seasonic X-650 PSU
Front case fans replaced with 2x Corsair AF120 Quiet edition fans (I just threw out like 20 corsair case fan boxes tonight! You'd think I have a stake in them or something )

 

[faelynn]

I was so excited that I wanted my computer together immediately. I had my husband power them up inside and taped the original led lights around the inside perimeter just to get an idea of what it would look like finished.

Those lights ended up being so difficult to work with. He stayed up so late for days in a row trying to get them done for a LAN party that was quickly approaching because he knew how much I wanted a beautiful case to show off!

You can see that the power supply doesn't have its light colored housing on yet. The black corner of the case really bothered me. I really wanted to just paint the power supply but he didn't want to void the warranty. He cleverly made a nice little box to cover it up for me, and I painted it with more of the 'stained glass' paint.

But once we found the current rgb leds that we're using I was so very pleased! It looked wonderful just in time for the LAN party and got lots of positive attention

I also painted the front door with acrylics and glitter paint pens to go with the ocean theme

 

[CrazyLefty]

Not my mod but wow that desk is http://youtu.be/uOjOnRq_57w

All the desks in our house were built by us as well

My wife and I share a long desk, and our son has his own as well.

 

[faelynn]

And just because being able to change the colors is awesome I need to share these with you all

 

[cnealjr]

Very cool set of mods you guys have done!

 

[DraginDime]

that is just cool. Awesome work, I really like the window art. Very nice. Love those Fractal cases, been wanting one for a while.

 

[Temo Vryce]

Not my cup of tea, but my daughter would love it so you get a "Nice job" from me.

 

[faelynn]

Yes it is a much more "girly" kind of pc, I've been trying to find active female gamer spaces to share this with more of an audience that would appreciate it, but its a bit tough going. I've found a reddit sub and a couple forums that aren't very active.