August 4, 2005 on 10:09 am | In Making | 1 Comment

ok, despite being a small-ish PC there was just too much to cover in
the last post. So here’s the second part of� ‘the
guts’!

The most important remaining part is the screen!

I
decided on an 8 inch touchscreen LCD Monitor – the Lilliput
809GL-80NP-T.
This should replace the 9 inch black & white tube in the mac
originally. Now, ideally I’d have liked a 9 inch screen but they don’t
seem to do those – also LCD screens are actually flat and square, and
the old mac screen is very curvy – so they’re never going to match up
properly at the edges without some fiddling.

Why a touch-screen? Again, I didn’t want the mac to need a
mouse and
keyboard attached to use it, but to be sat on its own as an
interesting
little thing to look at, but also be practical. A touchscreen means
that you can operate it using just fingers, or a little pointer, pen
lid, whatever. It’s pretty easy to clean off the smudgey finger prints
- and the little screen isn’t really what you’d watch a video on
anyway
- that’s why I have another TV / monitor output on the second graphics
card. That will hook up to a bigger display.

The touchscreen itself is just a USB cable and a rather
excellent driver that has a lot
of calibration options, more in fact that the tablet PC I
used to own! Go figure…

As the little screen was originally designed to fit into car
seats,
it is very low power and heat, so it’s perfect for my requirements -
it
also only needs DC 12V to power it, and not too many watts either.So
in
theory I should be able to run it off the main power supply for the
rest of the PC.

After looking up a couple of things on the internet, a trip to
maplin and a bit of trial and error, I created this cable:

It converts from a ‘morex’ power connector (found inside a PC)
to
the ‘jack plug’ connector the monitor used. Amazingly, it even works!
I
only need one power supply and on/off switch for the whole thing,
excellent.

One slight snag though – the monitor starts up in a ‘standby’
mode.
I checked with the manufacturers and their official way to fix that is
to take the thing apart, desolder a resistor and solder on extra wires
and a capacitor (so that when the power comes on, it also presses the
ON switch for you).� To be honest, that scared even me a bit
too
much at the moment, so I’ll be leaving that for now…

I also wanted to be able to control the mac from the comfort
of my
sofa – happily I’d previously bough an ATi Remote Wonder, which is a
radio-based remote that has a little USB receiver. Because it’s not
infra-red, again I don’t need to maim the front of the mac to put an
infra red receiver in. Hooray! Also, the range is much
better

Now as I’ve previously said, cables are bad – grr! So the mod
really
wouldn’t be complete without some form of WiFi adapter to use the
wireless network at home. Happily the Netgear router I’d bought a
while
back came with a free USB
WiFi Adapter, so that goes in the case too!

A few final bits and bobs to connect things together: I needed
a
nice rounded
IDE cable to go between the hard drive and the motherboard
- making it easier to put the drive where I wanted and improving
airflow and cooling in the case. Also the DVD drive needed a little
2.5″ drive
adapter screwed on the back, so that I could plug a standard
IDE cable into it (laptop and desktop drives have different
connectors,
though there’s no especially good reason for it)

A quick thought for the future – if you wanted to build your
own ‘Media Centre’ you might want to include a USB2
Digital Freeview TV Receiver for recording/receiving TV? I’ll
probably leave it out of the mac (for now!)

So that’s everything that I’m going to stick inside the Mac -
next time we’ll look at the software that actually makes it do (hopefully useful)
stuff…