EPIA Alloy mod

picoPSU

If you have read every step of this project so far, you should now be thinking along the lines of "motherboard and hard drive stealthed nicely. Great, but where is he going to hide a power supply?!?". Am I right? For sure, the standard desktop ATX power supply was one of the biggest drawbacks in my initial design. I really didn't know what I would do, but Geoff didn't even blink. "We'll use a picoPSU," he said, referring to the world's smallest power supply he saw at CES 2006.



A few days later a package arrived from my new best friends at mini-itx.com. The picoPSU was perfect for my project: it provides 120 Watts of power but is barely bigger than the ATX power socket that it plugs into. Despite its tiny size, it is really only the same price as a regular PSU - £46 from Mini-ITX.com though you also need to buy a laptop-style power brick if you don't already have one of those. In fact, you can buy everything you need for tiny case mods from them: EPIA motherboards, low profile RAM and all sorts of stuff you didn't know you wanted until you saw it.

Power Switch

The final job was to create a power switch for the system. I didn't want just any old button - it needed to be something that would be in tune with the whole racing theme of the case. There wasn't a good place to mount one of these modern dashboard Starter buttons so I followed my father's hotrodding roots and chose a simple push button, the kind you might mount on a steering wheel for a NOS boost!




I needed to build a little switch box, so let me show you a neat little trick. Take some 2mm sheet aluminium. Mark out the fold lines. No, we are not making a paper aeroplane - a flattened box is called a 'net'. Fold the box together and then just slather the whole thing in metal epoxy. This will hold the box together and it also dries really hard, so creates a really hard outer coating.



After the epoxy dried, sand the rough surface so that it is smooth all over. More red paint and you'd scarcely believe that just a few hours earlier it was a just plain sheet of aluminium.



More epoxy to hold it in place and a dash more red paint and we are done. No fancy lights - that's the last thing you want on a Media Center when you're in a dark room trying to watch a film.