erik's G5 mod- work log with pictures & ask/tell thread

[erik]

Check if +5V is present on the USB, check if D+ and D- lines were swapped.

Yep, everything is lined up. Honestly, I think it's just the motherboard. It works perfectly with some devices (Garmin GPS watch, 1gb USB stick, mouse, keyboard, bluetooth adapter) and not so perfectly with others (iPod shuffle -- it gives power), and not at all with others yet (16gb USB, iPhone). The 16gb actually works in windows, but the iPhone/iPod shuffle do not.

The only other thing I can think of is that:

1) The attachment I had did not have a shield ground. Doubtful, since this seems common enough.

2) I did a lousy job soldering, connecting cables (which I honestly don't think I did). Again doubtful, because it seems like if the electrons flow in one case, it should flow in others.

3) I used wires to connect/extend the cables that have bad/inappropriate electrical properties. (I basically used whatever I had lying around.) Again, I'm doubtful for the same reason as above.

In any event, I'm not losing sleep over it. It works for most basic tasks, and for other things I have like 80 other ports to use, including some attached to my monitor.

 

[erik]

Day 4

The Mountain Mods tray arrived in the mail. So the task of the day was to cut out the back panel to fit the G5 case. This is a pretty straightforward principal. My approach:

Tape over the whole damn thing with painters tape:

Line up the first cut by cutting the tape out where the back tray will be visible:

Cut it out! Note: I recommend putting some time aside so you can cut too narrowly and the edge out appropriately so it fits well. This way you'll get a good cut.

You'll also need to cut out a place for the latch. The metal is nice and soft and cuts easily. Again, I just used tape. Here's the result:

(The clamps above are the pistol clamps I mentioned. These are a huge time saver and get a real strong grip. Highly recommended.)

Here's the final result:

You can just use the provided case screws to attach the motherboard to the back panel. You may have to use a small drill-bit (easy on the Dremel with a flex shaft) to extend the holes in the back panel to allow the screws to go in the right place. Don't drill out too much -- the screw won't have anything to grip. Just drill little bit little, try to mount it, and if you need more, drill more. If you drill too much, the screw will not screw in, it'll just sit in there.

So at this point, I was proud, because it… looks good.


BUT: I made a mistake. The next day I realized I cut cut too high. Why? I didn't do a good job lining up the motherboard tray itself with the back panel when I laid out my cut. The result was that, although only a few millimeters, I cut the panel up too high. The motherboard tray can only go as high up as the top panel where the power supply is mounted. As a result, I had to cut down more on the bottom side to get the appropriate line-up between back panel and tray. As you'll see later, the result for me was a 2mm or so gap above the back panel.

How to avoid this? My suggestion is before doing ANY cutting or even taping to determine where to cut, assemble the three pieces of the motherboard tray. Use the assembled piece to line everything up. That way, you'll be sure to cut an appropriate sized hole to actually line up the damn tray correctly. Then you can make the fine adjustments to get it to mount. Don't make my mistake!

Thankfully, that's the biggest mistake I made, and its on the back of the tray, and its barely noticeable. My fiancee was like "I don't see what you messed up, what's the problem?" I'm like, see that little gap? Argh! No big deal in the long run. It's on the back

Anyway, all's well that end's well. The next job is to JB weld the stand-offs, create the power adapter, and cut-out where the power-adapter goes.

 

[erik]

Day 5

Today's job: Get the motherboard tray ready to mount and get the power adapter ready to attach.

First, I used JB weld to re-attach the standoffs. Be careful -- there are 8 stand-offs that are one length, and 4 (I think) more that are a little longer. I used the 8 -- they give a little bit of a boost to the motherboard tray, which helps the motherboard line-up correctly with the back panel.

My method was just to spread them out to support the tray adequately. No fancy measurement. Just make sure they'll be ALL underneath the tray, even if the tray can move a few millimeters in either direction. I put some JB weld down, stuck the stand-offs in them, rested the motherboard tray on top, and put about 20 pounds of weight on them. The JB weld sets in 25 minutes, is solid enough in 4-6 hours that you can move the case around and continue working. They recommend 15-24 hours until yuou put it in use… so I guess, don't put any really pressure on the stand offs until you've waited overnight.

Putting the stand-offs down:

And weight 'em down:

I did this in the morning before heading off to work. That gave the JB weld time to cure.

I came home and my IEC receptacles had arrived. Time to make the adapter to extend the power from the PSU to the back of the case.

I was a little nervous about this because soldering actual things where real electricity goes through freaked me out a bit. But once I saw the IEC receptacle I realized it's a pretty simple job.

The receptacle has three solder joints on the back: Live, Neutral, Ground. They are labeled. Consulting Wikipedia, I learn that Black goes to Live, White to neutral, Green to ground. Great. So, I cut an IEC power cable to about 10" long, trimmed the rubber off, and got ready to solder the ends on.

These are the steps I recommend:

1. Get "helping hands" for soldering. You cannot do this well if you have to hold up everything.

2. Strip your cable and leave enough bare cable to get a good wrap around the solder joints.

3. Cut a big piece of heat shrink that you'll use, to the extent possible, to "bring together" the three power attachments. Slide this down the cable.

3. One at a time (I did Live first, then Ground, then Neutral): Cut an appropriate size heat shrink to cover both the solder tip and the bare part of the cable. Slide it on. Next, thread the bare ends into the solder joints. Twist as tightly as you can, with the cables orthogonal to the solder joints (remember, the cable will run off this).

3. Use clips on your helping hands to hold the IEC receptacle on one side and the other side of the cable.

4. Heat up the solder receptacle with the gun and apply solder. This can take a while -- the solder connectors take longer to heat than, say, a wire.

5. When you've got a good joint, slide the heat shrink wrap over the connector and the bare part, and heat it up.

Here's what my process looked like at this point, with 1 connection made (ground):

6. When all three connections are made, slide the big piece of heat shrink up to "hold together" the three attachments. This will also cover any left over bare wire if you have any and make things look better. Heat it up. All done.

This is what my final product looks like:

Time to test it! Will I be able to plug in a regular cable into the female end, and the male end into a monitor and make it power on?

It works!

You'll see in the above picture that there's a messed up IEC receptacle. Luckily I had the foresight to buy two of the things (they're only 85 cents), knowing I'd probably mess it up). The first time through I screwed up in two ways: One, I held the gun too close to the plastic and heated up the plastic and one of the connectors shifted a little. No good. Second, I didn't get a really solid threading of the wire to the solder joint, and as a consequence the joint wasn't "straight". So don't make my mistakes.

Next, I cut out a place above the back panel to snap the receptacle in. I did this by first, outlining in tape the receptacle -- not the widest part, but the part where ethe cable actually goes in. Using a drill bit on a dremel, I cut it out. It's going to be too small. I then just extended it little by little until I could fit the cable AND receptacle through. Then it snapped on. It's not the tightest snap int the world, but it does the job. If you really want it to be 100% secure, use a IEC receptacle that screws on.

Here's the final result:

I was feeling energized, so I started to work on the front panel harness. Which means I separated all the different wires and labeled them with post-its. This is tedious as hell:

Then I soldered on two jumpers for the power switch and power LED. I used red for power and yellow for LED. That made sense to me. Whatever floats your boat. Here's the power jumper, soldered, but not yet heat-shrinked. Yee-haw:

That's a lot of work for one day!

 

[erik]

Day 6

Next up: Finish off the front panel harness, and put the computer together.

The front panel is -- to put it bluntly -- a pain in the ass to make. Not hard, just tedious. Here's what I did:

1. First, you need to make sure your jumpers/Firewire/USB connector cables are long enough to reach from the motherboard to the connector. It's not a short distance. In my case, the firewire/USB internal connectors I bought (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812201027) were too short. Which means I had to extend it.

2. So I extended it. For the Firewire, I just snipped off sections of old jumper cables I had that were the same color or close to it. I measured them roughly so they were the same length. I stripped the ends of the firewire cable and the extension piece and soldered them together and heat shrinked it up. Tedious as hell! Then I solder the harness to the connectors using the wiring ground. Nothing rocket science here, just lots of wire stripping and soldering and heat-shrinking.

Note: the cables I had were REALLY thin. My wire strippers were not up to the task. Use a utility knife to strip.

3. Next up was the USB section. Again, the cable was not long enough. I knew that I wasn't at this point going to bother trying to make the audio input work, which involves creating your own circuit board to rewire from the G5's audiosense cable to those in typical ATX motherboards. Maybe later. But not now. So I just snipped both ends from the audio cable I had and used it to extend my USB cable. Lol, maybe not too sophisticated. You'll only need to solder 4 ends (or 5 if there's a shield ground. Mine didn't have one.), since its a single USB port. I did all eight. The colors didn't match up perfectly, but they were close enough. Here's what it looked like 3 joints in.

Ugly as hell lol. Notice I have orange and yellow lined up. Close enough for me! Experts tell me: will these wires be any different and cause any issues? Everything worked, but I wonder if the reason my iPhone won't work but USB sticks, etc. will is because of that. Probably not. I think it's the motherboard -- the old front panels on my Antec case with the same motherboard didn't always work right either with the iPhone/iPod shuffle.

After making my extension, I soldered everything up to the front panel harness. It's ugly underneath, but with same braided wire covering, I was able to make a pretty attractive front panel harness when all was said and done:

I separated the firewire and USB because the ports on the mobo are not right next to each other. USB is close to the front panel connectors, so that was one strand, and firewire was in the middle of the board, so that's another strand. I'm happy with the result… and it works! Well, the power works, the LED works, and USB mostly works. Not sure if firewire works -- I used to have a firewire drive, but I can't find it for the life of me. I'll try to find a firewire device to test it with some day. I see no reason why it shouldn't work!

Next up -- time to put the case together. Woo!!

I forgot to take pictures of how I secured the motherboard tray to the case. I used three sheet metal screws that were just the right length to go through the motherboard tray (in the pre-drilled holes) and screw into the side panel of the case. I tried to use some grace and screw in ONLY far enough to mount, but not far enough to go through the side of the case. It's too damn thin. So there are three pin prick size holes in the left side of the case where the motherboard screws went through. They are silver, and don't look too bad, though I don't LIKE them. Thankfully, blemishes in the case are uglier than the little silver screws. I used the Dremel to grind off, carefully, the tip of the screw so its flat. I thought about using other methods, but I don't want the tray to… fall off the case. That would be bad! So this is a compromise.

Does anyone have a better method??

Anyway, I mounted the motherboard. My massive Noctua cooler fits *PERFECTLY*. Which is to say, it barely fits, lol:

Here's the power supply connector cable in action:

And here's the final product:

The hard drive rack is very cable heavy. It actually looks better in person in better light. No real way around this problem when you have five hard drives!

And the back.

You'll see there's a tiny little gap above the back panel. That's the mistake mentioned in an earlier post. Bloody hell! Could be worse!!

Note -- the two fans are 80mm Thermaltake hydrobearing fans. They're quiet and look pretty good.

Time to stop for the night, before putting the modded case back in its natural environment

 

[Einsteiniac]

It is coming out really awesome!

 

[erik]

Day 7

And the easiest, most fun part: putting it all back in the natural environment.

Here's the case all closed up:

And here's it opened up from a distance. I'm happy with how it looks! Also, I really like the easy way the case pops open with just popping one lever. Very cool design and very superior to thumb screws!

Here's the back, again, in the natural environment:

I used Gigabyte's Face Wizard program to create a new BIOS file with an Apple logo instead of the god-awful stock Gigabyte image. See this tutorial by damndoe for a how-to: http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=18040

Better! Although it still then shows a bunch more black screen stuff. Ah well. My right monitor wakes up faster than the left one... I was too slow to snap the picture with both visible. I can't be bothered!

Next, I use the LoginToLion Chameleon theme to extend the Apple look:

Looks nice… easy access to OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, and my backup Clone

And, we're in business!

I stopped up the overclock another 100 MHz since my re-installation of the heatsink using the Noctua-supplied goo seemed to drop the temps a little. Running at 4.3 GHz stable on an i7 960. Here's the geek bench:

Not bad!

Oh yeah, here's the DVD opened up with a USB stick in it. I haven't rigged anything fancy up to open the DVD-RW using a switch -- I have to eject from within OS X. Probably won't bother with a switch because… well… who really uses the DVD-RW anyway?

Here's the USB working in system profiler:

And… the final product, with my workstation back in business:

I'm happy with the result overall. A few mistakes here and there, but at least they're all invisible! Very rewarding, fun project.

Maybe I'll try a Mac Pro mod when I build a new computer a year from now. I'm holding off for the next gen of Intel chips to come out.

Thanks for the help everyone. Please ask questions -- I'm happy to answer!

 

[powerpcg5]

The receptacle has three solder joints on the back: Live, Neutral, Ground. They are labeled. Consulting Wikipedia, I learn that Green goes to Live, White to natural, Black to ground. Great. So, I cut an IEC power cable to about 10" long, trimmed the rubber off, and got ready to solder the ends on.

SAFETY ALERT!!!! You have it wired wrong. Black is NOT Ground for AC wiring.
Green (or bare copper wire) is safety ground
Black is Hot.
White or Gray is Neutral.

See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical ... th_America

 

[erik]

The receptacle has three solder joints on the back: Live, Neutral, Ground. They are labeled. Consulting Wikipedia, I learn that Green goes to Live, White to natural, Black to ground. Great. So, I cut an IEC power cable to about 10" long, trimmed the rubber off, and got ready to solder the ends on.

SAFETY ALERT!!!! You have it wired wrong. Black is NOT Ground for AC wiring.
Green (or bare copper wire) is safety ground
Black is Hot.
White or Gray is Neutral.

See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical ... th_America

You're right... But so was I, thankfully! I wired correctly, wrote the post wrong. Good catch. I checked and I wired it right (you can actually see in the picture that the black is Connected to the live). Oops--I wrote off the top of my head--should have checked.

I'll fix the post

EDIT: the cable on my front panel harness for the USB ground was black, so I think that's where my head went wonky

 

[erik]

Lol... My fiancée saw this thread and says she's embarrassed for our cats because you can see their poop in the litter box in a few photos.



I'm not ashamed. I have two cats. So what?