Creative X-Fi "Music Creation" Mod

The Power Surge

Now we come to the lighting or “animation” for the case. This consisted of three parts: a pair of blue LEDs pulsing inside the PSU; these would be powered by a small LED flasher kit from Maplin. Underneath the X-Fi card, plugged into a PCI slot, was to be a VU meter with its LEDs arranged in a circle. This circuit was bought from Rapid Electronics and was modified to accept a pulse stream from a circuit of my own which would control the final effect, the “Power Surge”.

The “Power Surge” effect consists of pulses of light travelling, or “surging”, down the power cables from the PSU into the motherboard. The overall effect is that of the PSU pulsing power, sending it down the power cables to the X-Fi card, which then appears to “throb” with activity. The latter effect is provided by the VU meter underneath the X-Fi card.



Here are the flashing kits bought from Maplin, and the PCB from Rapid Electronics.



The green LEDs that came with the VU meter kit are replaced with thirty 3mm blue LEDs. Once it had been built, the VU meter board had slots cut into its lower edge so that it could plug into a PCI slot. It would derive its power from a fan header on the mainboard - no electrical connections were made to the PCI slot. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of the VU meter built up or in the PCI slot but you can see it in action in the videos at the end of this article. The second picture is of the PCB for the “Power Surge” circuit.

Since most of the lighting effects involved the PSU, that seemed as good a place as any to start once the circuits had been built and tested.



I also wanted to remove any unnecessary cables from the PSU and shorten the remainder to a suitable length for each connector to keep the cabling as neat as possible. The cables were also going to be sleeved with blue braiding.

The first step was to open up the PSU.



The unit was stripped down to gain access to the underside of the main circuit board so cables could be unsoldered.



One by one, each wire was unsoldered and trimmed to length or removed depending on if it was being kept or not. This is actually quite a time consuming job - I certainly did not want to get crossed wires and blow up the entire system!


Surging forward…