Saturday, April 29, 2006

Construction is now underway...

I couldn't wait until Monday to get started, so I have already begun building the computer. So far building this computer has not been what I had expected. It usually doesn't take very much time for me to make a computer, but this one has taken twenty minutes just to figure out how to open the case.

Here is the case with the motherboard and ram installed:
Once I installed the motherboard and ram I created a space to setup the rest of the computer and install the necessary software:

There are several problems that I have encountered in just building the computer outside of the car. The first was that the power supply for the computer is DC-DC so I had to use an AC power supply and this created the problem of how to interface with the hard drive.
The way the case is designed the hard drive fits in a slot just next to the power supply. There the hard drive connects to a small PCB that converts the 2.5" laptop drive to IDE interface. This makes it possible for the hard drive to connect to the motherboard since IDE is the standard I/O for motherboards, without this PCB it would be much more difficult to use a hard drive with the computer (note: a hard drive is required for most computers to function) . Luckily I have a laptop drive interface to IDE converter that I used to connect the hard drive to the motherboard. I connected the slim type cd rom interface to ide converter and plugged the dvd-rom drive into the motherboard as well.
Next I connected the video card and sound card to the computer. Normally this motherboard has only one PCI slot, but the case that i purchased offers two and includes a two slot PCI riser card. Since the two slot PCI riser card is connected to the same piece as the power supply I had to remove it to allow me to use my sound card and video card. With those two devices now installed I connected the screen and currently I am ready for software installation.

Here is how the hard drive mounts onto the power supply piece:

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