So this is the second part of my steampunk PC case. If you haven’t seen part 1, check it out here. The first part mainly goes into the design and building the case itself. This part will explain how everything was wired up and some final assembly.
Power and Reset Switches
The power and reset switches were quite easy to wire up in the end. Just make sure you buy momentary switches (see links in Part 1), not the latching one that I did. To connect them to the motherboard I raided an old PC case I had lying around and cut the switches off the appropriate front panel cables. I then soldered them onto the new switches and connected them up to the motherboard. This was a really cheap and easy way to do it. It also meant that my cables had the correct wording on the jumpers for when I connected them to the motherboard. The switches I used also had LEDs in them, which I connected to the power LED and the hard drive activity LED. Once again I cut these leads from an old case I had. Just be careful here that you solder the leads the correct way around. LEDs are polarity sensitive so will only work one way. The best way to check is just try both ways (and use the one that works). The LED is a diode, so you aren’t going to damage anything if you wire it up the wrong way around. See image below for the final result:
Front Panel Switch Wiring
As you will have seen in Part 1, the front panel of my steampunk PC case has four illuminated switches along the top. These control the small gear train on the side of the case, two different fans, and the volt meter. The power for all these items was pulled from a hard drive power connector. The fans and the motor I had all used 12V. This meant that I had to use the yellow and the black leads from the hard drive connector. I also had the LEDs on the switches to consider. These were provided with an inbuilt resistor, so it was just a matter of connecting 12V to them. The schematics below explain how all the connections were made (I cut the connectors off all the plugs and just soldered them):
Final Assembly
After everything was wired together, the computer parts were installed. This was pretty straight forward, just using small timber screws to secure all the parts to the case. For the final touch I added some brass hinges and a latch so that I could get the top open for maintenance or changing parts. See below:
The eagle eyed among you may have noted the steampunk themed USB cable plugged into the case. Stay tuned for the post on that one. That concludes this build. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below. Thanks for following along.