August 28, 2005 on 4:38 pm | In Making | 2 Comments

On switch, reset switch, power light, hard disk light. Dull stuff…
but vital if you want to actually be able to turn your PC on and see if
it’s doing anything! The problem is that I didn’t want to us the cables
that came with the original case, and when I ordered new motherboard
pin connectors, the wrong ones came – spot the difference:

The
problem is that these don’t fit the motherboard pins – arg. However, I
remembered a cunning trick that I heard about. The case connectors are
all separated because they need to fit lots of different motherboards,
which tend to put their connector pins in different orders. However,
I’m only trying to work with one motherboard, so I could wire
everything up to a single big block and put it on the motherboard. To
do this, I took a spare IDC connector and ribbon cable from an unused
floppy drive:

Using a coping saw with a nice fine blade, I chopped the ends off so I had a socket exactly the right size for the motherboard:

Then,
using the manual for the motherboard, I worked out what pin was
connected to what wire, labeled the cable and soldered it to new push
switches / LEDs I’d bought earlier:

Finally I used some modeling epoxy glue to glue the now-smaller connector back together:

Happily
the resulting cable works perfectly and I can now make my mini-itx
board work! I just need to find places in the new Mac ‘case’ to put the
switches and lights. I think the lights will hide in old eject holes
for the floppy drive, and the switches will be around the back, where
they won’t ruin the lovely front of the mac.