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Here's the project log for my first ATOM project.

Was walking around an industrial park last year, and saw this being thrown in the rubbish dump.
Thought it had potential and I had gotten an ATOM 230.



Opening it:









So I decided to mod this case, and build my ATOM onto it.

Stripped out everything, and I took an old mod casing motherboard tray and mounted the ATOM for comparision







It does fit, though I have to re-engineer the interior as it had nothing, brackets or mounts of any sort

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Sizing up the PSU available, it was clear I could only use a SFX size, a standard ATX would never fit. And the PSU had to be standing on it's size

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Optical Drive:
Hanging Concept
As I saw there was a slide-able rail, I came out with the idea of hanging the optical drive on the rail.
The hanging was simply done with cut arylic pieces which had to fit the space given.

Left, Right and Front View of the Optical Drive







And the optical drive mounted in the casing

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After putting the optical drive, then I realized that there wasn't space to mounted either a 2.5" or 3.5" HDD into the space left.

After some brain racking, I decided that the MB tray had to cut to provide a HDD space.

The bottom of the case was mounted with a arylic spacer plate to provde electrical isolation from the HDD to the casing.



So out came my dremel, a rectangular slot was cut open, and the tray was re-sprayed black.
Black seems to be a recurrent theme with my projects.



A dummy HDD shows the placement

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Now for the front and back plates:

A trace of the original metal face plate was done on Arylic



Thank goodness I did not throw everything away.

A transparent and a white one was prepared for the back and front face plates

The transparent was used to trace back the IO slots and the pico PSU.
(Was the first sratch casing I did, so a bit kia su.....)
It was then later spray black to hide the transparent-ness

Nice and Tidy.... The way it should be

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For the front panel, the DVD slot was cut leaving somespace for other items.

The white panel original design was with a VFD.
Here's a snap shot of it being in trials.





I dropped it, though technically it was quite straight forward. I just did not have space for it.
This idea would later be re-born into my next project.

In place of it, I managed to dig up some older stuff I salvaged, 2 temperature monitors which were then re-sprayed black on the outside.



I had to re-wire them out and power them seperately.



A simple molex 5V to standard pin outputs.

So the temperature probes are powered from this end.

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I walked around SLS 2nd hand shops and managed to snag this re-cycled USB and audio ports.



And you can see the top portion shows the simple push buttons.
On & Off
Rest
With a LED




One temperature probe is for the HDD, the other is for the interior of the casing

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The exterior of the casing was re-sprayed with blue and the whole system was loaded with Linux Ubuntu 8.04 (Yes... the project was quite old, finished last year )



Hope this was interesting to the viewers.

Have a nice day!

[Zetc]

creatively done!