The PAT
October 4, 2010
Welcome back everyone!
Alright so I haven’t done a new blog post in while. For those of you that do not know, I am currently attending MSOE (Milwaukee School of Engineering) with a major in Computer Engineering. Before I left for school though, I finished up a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. During the summer I was working for my local high school with Josh Betz and Nick Kysely in the IT department. Towards the end of the summer, we had a Power Mac G4 die with a bad motherboard. Seeing as this was pretty much useless now, I figured it would be cool to use the case for a project. I decided to make a media center, a Proper Apple TV if you will. Or if you want to interpret it as the PC Apple TV that’s perfectly fine.
I’ve had this micro-ATX board laying around for sometime and I’ve always wanted to use it for a media center. Now that I had this awesome G4 case I thought I could make an attractive media center. After stripping out the Mac motherboard, power supply, hard drive, zip drive, and CD drive I began to see a light of hope at the end of the tunnel. I roughly lined up the micro-ATX board, and it turned out that if I cut some things out of the case, I could easily fit this board in the case. The case had some posts sticking out so that the G4 motherboard could sit nice and tight. That’s all good and wonderful, but they were not in the standard ATX placement, so they had to go. The back panel was also an issue, as the rear ports on the micro-ATX motherboard were blocked by a piece of metal.
After everything was cut out, I had to find a way to mount the motherboard with some risers. I ended up using some long machine screws and nuts to hold the board in place. Some small lengths of rubber hose were used as spacers so that the board wouldn’t short out. The next task was to install a power supply. The great thing about the G4 is that was the same size (though incorrect pinouts) as a normal ATX PSU, so all I had to do was a quick swap. After I wired it all up, I could finally test if the board actually worked. It turns out that it didn’t, well, at least not until after a few hours of debugging. It turns out that the CMOS battery was completely dead, and when I replaced it the board ran perfectly.
Everything was mounted, so I decided that I could finally go to install an OS and finish this project up. I went to close the case and ran into one problem, the mount for the DVD drive stuck too far into the case and bumped up against the RAM if you tried to close it. I tore apart the whole case to separate the DVD mount from the rest of the case. I then used some tin snips to cut off the extra metal so that the RAM could clear it properly. I was able to find a DVD drive laying around that was an inch shorter than any other drive I had, so that fit in perfectly and was not in the way. I went to close the case a second time and had a real rough time getting it to close. I opened it again and saw that the DVD drive mount was also in the way of some capacitors on the motherboard. Instead of sacrificing the DVD drive, I decided to relocate the capacitors.
After relocating the capacitors, everything fit perfectly. I could now close the case with no problems. The machine booted up fine, so I began to install Windows 7. Keep in mind that this is a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 machine with 512MB of RAM. I installed Boxee and everything ran smoothly.
Once I got up to school, I began to spend more time on this project, fine tuning it to my liking. Since I’ve been up here, I’ve added a Hauppauge HVR-1600 TV tuner, a GeForce 8400GS PCI video card, and a 320GB hard drive. The TV tuner is used only for the remote, by the way. I don’t know how else I could improve on this machine, though I am currently waiting on a 2TB hard drive to be delivered today. The machine is really quiet, attractive, and most of all, useful. It’s really nice being able to have a device where you can just throw a bunch of crap on it and not worry if it will play or not.
Below are some pictures of the build. Please excuse the bad pictures, the only camera I have up here at school is the one on my phone.
UPDATE: I found out that XBMC Dharma 2 works flawlessly with hardware acceleration when you’re running Windows 7. I have XBMC running now with the Night theme and my new 2TB drive to store all of my media. This is easily the best media center interface that I’ve used. I have so much room for content now that I have no need for Netflix or cable TV.
This entry was posted in Hacks, Projects and tagged-
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Yeah those posts put up a fight when I went and took them off. It was worth it though. I just have to flip the fan in it in the other direction so that it takes all the hot air out.
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I just took a dremel and cut them out, much easier.
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I tried this about a year ago with one of those from the school, I killed my mobo doing it though when I forgot that i had a screw touching the case to one of the solder points on the board.