A Descent into Madness: The First Landing

It's been a bit since I posted the first installment of this series, and today we're at the stage where I think all the small tweaks have been made to the various support PCBs necessary. As it turns out, CAD is useful! During the initial fit up of the boards in CAD, there were clearance and alignment issues between the riser and the front panel.

Additionally, reverse engineering connector locations well enough to mate with 2.00mm pitch connectors is... hard. I tried 5 different ways, and all of them gave widely different results. I finally settled on a dial indicator on an XY table I have with my microscope setup with crosshairs. While I still had some (~.6mm) error across the full length of the front panel, I'm fairly certain in the locations of the connectors I'm mating with.

Another issue that appeared during the initial fit up was the power connectors I had chosen weren't going to fit. So, instead, I've opted for a 12 pin PicoLock from Molex to the riser from the PSU and then an edge connector for lighting to supply the VBus to the USB 3.0 to Type C ports on the front panel. Additionally, I've connected the Drive Activity signal from the M2 connectors all the way out to the main System HDD LED.

Most of the work this week has just been in trying to figure out the connector placements, which has given me a new and profound respect for metrology and standards bodies, but now that I've got the placements for everything, I can proceed to start designing the case in earnest.

Starting to take shape..

Front panel mating.

Processing img 7fkvlf8ueraf1...

Make sure you use the right kind of screw.