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For questions, remarks or suggestions just
e-mail me.
I wanted to build an HTPC that did not look like a PC, but like one of my other
hifi stand-alones, as I didn't want it to look out of place in the
hifi-stand I am building at the moment.
So the first thing I did was to look for a suitable case, which was not as easy
as I thought.
Although there are a lot of companies on the internet offering hifi-like cases,
most of them still looked like PC-cases.
After about a week of vigorous searching I stumbled across a company called
Atech Fabrication, they make an
hifi-like case called "The Heatsink Case".
The very kind and helpfull people at Atech Fabrication agreed to send me the case
with a flat unworked frontplate, except for a 45 degree chamfered edge.
This is how I received the case:
Now that I had the case, the first thing to do was to make an AutoCAD drawing
of the modifications to the frontplate:
After exporting the AutoCAD drawing to the CNC-mill (Step
Four Basic 540) of a very good friend of mine, I closed my eyes and pressed
"Execute" to start the mill ☻.
Offcourse I didn't use the original aluminium frontplate to test whether the
AutoCAD-drawing had been converted correctly, I first tested on a piece of MDF.
After having successfully created a MDF frontplate, I started the CNC-mill on the
aluminium frontplate.
It took 5 hours to complete the job.
 
 
To prepare the fontplate for the anodizing process (black) I had to make sure
there was not a single scratch, no matter how small, left on the surface,
because the anodizing process makes all scratches clearly visible
So I started sanding the frontplate with different types of sandpaper, starting
with 160 grid, then 200, 320, 400 and finally 600, the sanding was done only in
1 direction, from left to right over the length of the frontplate, to achieve a
similar finish I had on my other hifi stand-alones with anodized fronts.
The last treatment was polishing the frontplate with metal-polish.
Now it was time to make the buttons.
I made the buttons on a lathe out of silver-aluminium.
In each button I drilled a hole in the side and in the front, for a blue led and
filled the front hole with clear epoxy to disperse the fairly bright blue light
from the led.
 
The plate, used to install the buttons, was made on the CNC-mill also, using
the same AutoCAD drawing, to
make sure the buttons, which have just 0.25 mm clearance, would fit perfectly in
the frontplate (and they did ☻), the
momentary-make-switches were glued into the buttons.
The 5 buttons (with blue leds) in the middle are there to control the LCD
settings and are directly connected to it's circuit-board.
Furthermore there is a Power-button (with a red LED), a small reset-button (not
lighted) and a DVD-eject button (blue led).
 
Now it was time to install the 7" TFT LCD with touchscreen, I used the 700TS
from Xenarc
I removed the LCD from it's original housing and isolated the circuit-board by
installing a piece of clear orange plastic between the LCD-display and
it's circuit board.
The display is being powered by the 12 V leads of a PSU-connector, the leds by the 5V leads.
 
To complete the front of the HTPC I filled an A4-size sheet of
paper with
different kinds of dolby-, dvd- and dts-logos and text and send the jpg to
www.drucker-onkel.de,
who printed it on decal-sheets (you know like the decals you get with plastic
models, you put them in water and a very thin "sticker" remains) in 3 different
colours: Gold, Silver and White.
After some trying and testing I decided against the gold and white and put the
silver-decals on the frontplate using special decal-adhesion fluids:
Microscale Industries, Inc - Micro SET and
Micro SOL, so they wouldn't fall of or get damaged when touching them.
I also wanted a Brand-logo on my HTPC, so I decided to use my
last name: "Busch".
The same friend who let me use his CNC-mill, used it to mill my name into a 59 x 11 x 1 mm piece of brass.
To prevent the brand-logo from corroding, I polished it with metal-polish and
then sealed it with a coat of clear glossy-lacquer.
Here is the result, my HTPC running myHTPC ☻:
 
Here a picture of the inside, as you can see there is not much
room left.
In order to be able to accomodate every piece of hardware, I wanted inside the
case, I had to mount the harddisk sideways to the top-cover, above PCI-slot 4.
The DVD-Player was moved further to the right (compared to where Atech
Fabrication originally planned a DVD-drive), to make room for the LCD-display.
The Zalman heatsink is being cooled by 2 70 mm case-fans, that came with the
case.
I build a shroud so the air of both fans is directed over it.
I modified the fans by soldering a 25 Ω resistor in the +12 V
lead, they now run much more quiet at 10V, while still providing enough air for
cooling.
The Bicker Elektronik power supply (this one I bought myself and
was not supplied by Atech Fabrication) came with a lot of
power-leads and connectors, more then I needed for my HTPC, furthermore they were much too
long.
So I modified the PSU by removing all power-leads I did not need, reversed the
air-flow in the PSU so it now blew air out of the case and soldered a 50
Ω resistor in the +12 V lead of both 50 mm PSU-fans so they both now run much
more quiet at 10V.
 
To complete the inards of my HTPC, I used:
The software running my HTPC:
To save space in my HTPC and to keep my DivX and XviD movies in a central
place, they are not stored on the 120Gb drive of the HTPC.
The movies are played from a central media-server, over a 100 Mbit dedicated
network.
For playback this is absolutely no problem, ie. worse case scenario
(bandwith-wise) would be playing a DVD from the media-server with DTS.
The video-content is about 8000 kbit/s, DTS is about 896 kbit/s (twice as much
as a 448 kbit/s AC3-stream), totaling approximately 9000 kbits/s.
Add another 15% for network overhead, we get 10350 kbit/s.
10350 Kbit/s ≡ 1293.75 Kbyte/s ≡ 1.26 Mbyte/s.
On a 100 Mbit network, theoretically a bandwidth of: 100 mbit/s ≡ 11111 kbyte/s ≡
10.85 Mbyte/s is available.
Practically you would never reach that throughput, from experience I know about
9 Mbyte/s are possible.
In other words, a 100 Mbit network has more than enough bandwidth to play movies
or music over.
I hope you guys enjoyed this little article about my HTPC.
For questions, remarks or suggestions just
e-mail me.
P.S.: I would like to thank my friend Gustaaf "Suug" Eldering for all his
help in building my HTPC.
Without him it would not have been possible.
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