Thanks for the Feedback guys! I’ll put an interior switch behind the front door, which will enable me to turn the lights on and off at will without so much as a worry. Now I’ll get on with that worklog that I’ve been promising you for about a month.

I’ve got the front end ready to cut, and I’ve been trying to get the time to cut the damn thing for ages. Hopefully today, but you never can tell. Pretty boring at this end, not much to show at the minute.

But there’s a decent amount of progress with my dashboard (and that is what I shall call it henceforth). It’s going to have 2 fan speed controllers built in, a vandal proof switch for the main power, and two smaller switches to control the doors of the drives. The one to the left will control the case fans and the one to the right will control the speed of the Zalman fans that I’m using in this case.

To design it, I masked off an area from a piece of aluminium. I then cut out the shapes in cardboard, so I could choose exactly where to put everything. When that was done, I drew my plans in the masking tape, and got to work. I had a bit of help from my friend Cheryl here, thanks for helping me to enlarge the holes!

After a few hours of work it had all the necessary holes. I also had a small problem; somehow I had managed to put a massive scratch into the metalwork. But, after a round of some heavy wet and dry paper, I managed to remove the worst of the damage. By putting it together with sticky tape and screws, I ended up with this (although the knobs for the fan speed controller are not installed at this point).

Inside, instead of using the circuit that I’d planned to use, I’m using some modified Zalman Fanmates. This pic shows the progress: I’ll do a small diagram about how to modify the Zalman Fanmates when they’re finished. It’s a simple circuit that anyone can make. Hell, I did it.

I know this was possibly the worst update ever, but I’ve got a lot of things half finished. I’m just waiting till I have more done so I can show you something more substantial. Watch this space!