The Sun shines again

As all great projects, this one started with a Dremel and some destruction. The back side of my external SCSI hdd boxes from sun was to receive a make over. One thing can be said about the boxes – they are heavy and now I know why. There was quite a lot of steel to cut through, but the results where nice.

To fit the board in the box, I superglued a set of distances to the chassis. There is about 2-3mm of margin to fit the board in, so it was tight.

Then I fitted a 80W PicoPSU. This allowed me to move the main part of the power supply outside the box, as the PicoPSU is powered by a 12V DC power brick.

To get the power through, I had to make an extra hole in the plates for the motherboard’s connectors. That is how tight the fit was. No additional space on the back side to drill an additional hole.

The system is run from an 8GB CompactFlash card. Most cards can apparently be used as an PATA/IDE drive. As the CF-to-IDE converter had a floppy drive power connector, I had to build a cable for it. Also, notice the tape in the top right corner of the converter – it covers a really bright red LED.

And here is the real LED. It is green and it is original. Connected nicely with the HDD activity pins of the motherboard.

So, here it is again. A sun box has sparked into new life.