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| Silvertooth (g4 htpc conversion) |
| Written by Matthew Hershberger | ||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 01 September 2005 | ||||||||||||||||
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Silvertooth is a case mod that involved transfering the contents of a Power Macintosh G4 (AGP) into a Silverstone Lascala 16M HTPC case.
The motivation for this project came from the desire to breath new life into a 1ghz g4 system that had been used primarily for file sharing, subversion repositories, and regression testing. When finished, this new system will be controlled by an infrared remote control. The remote will provide the happy catch potatoe access to iTunes and Apple's DVD Player. It will also blend in completely with my other stereo and video components. I wanted an enclosure that would not distract the eyes with bright blue lights or the ears with buzzing fans. I chose the LC16m because it offered, among other things, front mounted usb, firewire, and stereo ports, room for size hard drives, and it perfectly matched the finish of my other hifi equipment. This was a lofty project to start with only two weeks remaining in the contest. The biggest problem was that the LC16M did not begin shipping until August 15th. I have invested 11 hours into this project. 
iMon remote included with LC16m Tools Manifest
Equipment Manifest
ATX ConversionBefore the case arrived there was plenty of work to be accomplished. The drives, motherboard, and cables needed stripped from the g4 tower. Because my power requirements demanded at least 400 watts I had to upgrade to an ATX power supply. I modified a 20 pin atx extension cable to provide the correct voltages to the g4 motherboard. Instead of soldering the wires I used crimp on clips from RadioShack. I found this to be quicker than soldering. This has been covered by other modders so I won't go into more detail. Mounting optical and hard disksFor storage I choose 4 Maxtor 300GB 16mb cache SATA drives. The obvious choice for raid was the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820A from Highpoint Technologies. It is the only card I could find that supported serial ata, with raid 5, on 64-bit 33mhz pci bus. I transfered my 120GB hard disks, for use boot volumes, and my pioneer dvd writer from the g4 case. Cutting the heat sinkUnlike ATX motherboards, the g4 processor is located near the front of the board. In HTPC cases room is normally tighter and the standard g4 heat sink hit the bottom edge of the 5.25 cdrom bay. I was forced to cut two rows of fins down to 1cm to get the heat sink to mount properly. You will notice that in the provided pictures the cut heat sink fins are taller than 1cm. I measured incorrectly and had to recut. The pictures from the second attempt were extremely blurry - low light without flash. Mounting the motherboardThe front right mounting hole on the motherboard lines up perfectly with a predrilled hole in the case. For the remaining mounts I used small metal stands that came with another case that I had. I bent the pins on the metal stands inwards so they sat flat inside the case. Even though I managed to fit everything inside space is limited. The heat sink can only be put in place after cdrom module has been mounted. Installation and BootWith only passive cooling this system purrs to life with the soft whine of 6 hard drives in motion. I installed tiger onto one of the western digital drives because the tiger installation cd does not include drivers for the raid card. After installing the raid drivers it took a little over nine hours for 848GB of raid5 storage space to rebuild. Write speeds averaged 15mb/s for large files. VFD and Remote ControlSo why isn't this hooked up to a television? There is still much to be done before this system goes into the living room. I am in the process of writing a usb driver to control the ir/vfd and front panel buttons. After that I need to design a Control Panel to configure the remote. Then I must write Applescripts to manage iTunes and the Apple DVD Player. All of which will be made available when finished. 
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