For the drives I used a lap-top HD and a slot-load DVD. The aim was to make it fit almost invisibly behind the floppy slot of the Mac. Fitting the optical drive was a labour of love. I managed to find a 1U server PSU which would fit in the shell of the old Mac PSU (with a bit of sawing). A bit of cutting needed to give enough room for the heat sinks and IO ports.įor the PSU I wanted to keep the Mac's original mains input and also power the monitor and computer together. Strip off the daughter board for the CF and PC-Card slots and it'll just about fit. Luck was with me here because the ITX board almost has the same height profile. The Mac designers must have really thought in 3D because all the Mac boards only fit because of the way the heights of the components are distributed. This space is wedge-shaped and higher at the front than the back. The ITX board goes where the original Mac's logic board was - in a little space under the Mac's internal sub-frame. With the CRT and the board in I now had an SE/30 changed in to a black and white monitor. Adjustments now have to be done with a very long insulated probe! Fortunately once set right they don't need to be changed. I also had to turn around the original front-panel controls to face inside the case. I finally managed to squeeze it in above the disk drives and just below the CRT. The Mac had its analog electronics on a board mounted sideways next to the CRT. Unfortunately I wasn't quite so lucky with the circuit board. Getting it home and ripping the guts out the Mac and the monitor showed that (hooray) the tube is almost exactly the same dimensions as the Mac original, and fits perfectly in the original mounting points without any modification.
After a few weeks searching I finally found a likely candidate from a company that produces TV game shows who were selling off some monitors previously used by audience members to cast their votes. Buy a 9" PC monitor off ebay and fix it in to the Mac's case.
The Mac's original monitor circuit really does only support black and white (no greys!) and you would have to design a new CRT driver circuit to make the conversion. I managed to get a picture but there turns out to be a lot of work to do before getting a good solution this way. My first experiments were to connect the old Mac's analog electronics to the output of my PC. For me that little curved 9" monitor is a key part of the retro appeal, so I wanted to keep it.
Most Mac ITX mods replace the Mac's black and white CRT with an LCD in the bezel. The first challenge is what to do with the display. Don't attempt this unless you really know what you are doing.
By the way, unlike most ITX mods this one involves lethal high voltages.
Inspired by the Stealth SX64 mod I wanted to make it as close to the original Mac as possible - keep the whole look and feel intact. Normally the Mac case ends up with lots of ugly mods to it. Now, I am hardly the first person to put an ITX board in a Mac case, but I was after something a bit different from all the other ones I've seen. I did want to do some engineering that didn't involve Powerpoint. Still, I did wantĪ media server for the living room, and I did want to do a mini-ITX project, and Nothing useful to do with my old SE/30 sitting up in the loft. I think the classic compact Macs still look pretty cool, but there was
The "Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle 2008"įull alphabetical archive on right hand side of page. The Redstone PC is the ultimate Mini-ITX Minecraft Machine