Hello again, readers and fellow fixers! Now, we admit that we placed our media centre build on the back burner. Since the last time we covered the project, we were busy with a lot of repair jobs. Gareth’s founding of Reyt Repair brought our BitFIXit repair cafes together as combined Saturday sessions. As a result, we had less time to work on our media centre build in order to complete the project.
But what progress did we make when we did find time to look into the project? Well, here’s a good time to explain…
Working on the media centre build…
Firstly, I found a suitable chipset heatsink from an old Dell motherboard, which perfectly suited the project! It covered both the SoC and RAM, enabling it to cool both chips at once. And using a couple of thermal pads helped avoid the risk of it fouling other components. This heatsink should provide better cooling performance than the small silver heatsinks.
As for the fan, I made holes in the roof of the speaker case for screwing the fan in place. I positioned it, so that it serves as the exhaust fan to draw out the warm air. Other holes at the top of the case provide added ventilation. Oh, and by the way, we worked out a way to connect the fan directly to the SBC! Doing this removed the need for implementing PWM with an Arduino board and fan controller. In turn, we simplified the media centre build and kept space free for cable routing and other things.
I re-ran the same tests as last time, and what a difference the fan and chipset heatsink makes! With this setup, we achieved temperatures in the 60’s in degrees C. This means we can achieve a better media centre experience, since the SoC has more thermal headroom. And so, we solved this cooling conundrum!
But there’s another problem!
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. We found time to look into completing our media centre PC project. And we discovered another problem, something we didn’t realise until now. The speaker case had rounded faces on the side, which prevented ports from sitting flush. Hence, why Gareth made the side holes larger, so that we can plug in the HDMI cable and adapter. Turning the SBC on its sides didn’t solve this problem, either.
Speaking of the side ports, having large holes just for these made the setup quite ugly. The HDMI cable and AC barrel connector went quite far into the case. Not the most elegant when trying to put together a nice, compact media centre PC. So, we decided not to continue using the speaker case as the housing for the media centre build…
What to do now…?
But fear not, as we’re not throwing in the towel with this project just yet! We’ll try to find another suitable candidate for housing the gubbins we amassed so far. It will be the third and final throw of the dice, though. We already went through two candidates so far, and neither proved suitable for us.
Gareth suggested using an existing CAD design for a Pine H64 case as a template for our potential version. We really don’t want to go that far, as we still want to stick to our five R’s in various ways. But if work on our third reuse candidate doesn’t work out…well, we’ll have to do a 3D printed case. Specifically as a last resort.
Well, this wraps up the progress on our project so far. It’s basically a case of one step forward, however many steps back – to square one! As I said, we’ll carry on working on this project to the very end. All being well, we’ll find a casing from and old unit which suits our media centre build. And on that note – just keep calm and keep on fixing!