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Project Serendipity Core V71 PC Mod


RocknR00ster

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Project Serendipity came about by an ah ha moment. How it got its name was more inspired by the color scheme and design which is going to be black and white, but the predominate color will be swapped between the inside and outside. So for instance the outside of the case will be predominately black with white hand painted features and the inside of the case will be predominately white with black features. I would show off a design with a sketch or something, but I am having trouble getting my idea out on paper, so I will do my best to paint a picture with words and video and images.

 

Something new to me and very fun is the lighting features I am working on. Of course I could go out and by RGB lighting that already comes with controls, but they are limited on their capability and I want to have a serious light show. So I opted to use Adafruit's NeoPixel light strips and an Adruino to control them. At that time I knew it could be done, but I hadn't the slightest idea how I was going to achieve what I wanted to do. Then I stumbled upon this guys unbelievably amazing build doing exactly what I wanted.

 


 

Got an idea of what I want to do yet? Yeah this is so freaking cool and technical!

 

What I did to copy what Will from Fuzzletek did took a bit to figure out, especially for this Arduino n00b. Apparently they are working on releasing a version of the software that doesn't require licensing. When that is to be released is still an unknown.

 

Don't worry, you can achieve this level of awesome and it's a lot simpler than the process Will took, to an extent. You can make it difficult if you really want to custom a color scheme to match a song directly. That usually requires something like AfterEffects to produce a video with matched audio/visual queues that you have to manually build for the entire song. This is a bit more difficult, but gives you complete control over all your LED's. This method also allows for a really cool ambient color effect as seen in the videos below.

 


 


 

Ultimately I found a piece of software called Glediator by pure accident. This is called an led matrix control software and is open source. Follow the directions on their page and you too can ultimately run your lighting effects the way you want, including ambient lighting.

 

glediator.png

 

 

There are alternative software sets that are more complicated and less attractive and not as useful or easy as this one and I grantee this is the better option currently available that I am aware of. If you find one other than this that is open source, works with Arduino and Adafruit Neopixel light strips I would love to know about it! 

 


Next I will go over the parts list, show a picture of the progress. This will be one of the more intricate PC builds I have ever done. The acrylic and wiring alone is expected to take a pretty long time. Mainly because of how I want the wiring displayed.

 

Thermaltake Core V71 (Currently working on the case, thank you Thermaltake!)

Thermaltake cooling (*)

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD's x2 (*)

ASUS Z170-DELUXE (*)

Intel Core i7-6700K (*)

Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB Kit (*)

NVIDIA GTX 980ti (Just got this part last week, thank you NVIDIA!)

Arduino

AdaFruit NeoPixels

* = parts not in my possession yet

 

First picture of the template layout for the acrylic covers.

 

pc_acrylic.jpg

 

More to come, main blog page is located at http://www.techpron.com/portfolio/project-serendipity-pc-mod/

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  • 2 weeks later...

A little update, this is not the system setup for Serendipity. I am using my every day PC as a test bed to see how the lights look inside a case. So far so good with the Arduino and NeoPixels. I'm using a software program called Jinx! which is much more stable than Glediator and offers a lot more features, but still uses the Arduino sketch from Glediator. Eventually, once I have it all done, I will have instructions on creating your own amazing light how inside your PC. I'm also now working with a friend on building a custom desktop application that has a mobile application that can contrl the lighting remotely without having to make the Arduino code overly complicated. There is a chance that this route may change the controller to a Raspberry Pi, which uses Python and an Linux based operating code. This route could definitely make it easier for future lighting projects and would be an open source platform eventually available on Github.
 
https://youtu.be/ZcOg_fiS0N4
 
I had an accident the other night when I turned on the PSU to power the lights. The power adapter for the Arduino (which wasn't plugged in at the time) had shorted out on the PC case (not paying attention). Luckily it didn't kill anything like the Thermaltake PSU that I am using to power the lights, It definitely looks much worse than it could have been.

 

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UPDATE 9/5/2015

Acrylic templates coming along. I’m going to be using an opaque white acrylic. Enough to allow NeoPixels to shine through. Here I removed the drive tray support. Previously I was going to use that as part of a display support, but it stuck out too far and would have made it a pain to work with. Plus one solid flat piece looks a lot cleaner. ‪#‎projectserendipity‬

 

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That back panel is the next step. I'm going to be pulling that out, removing a section and replacing it with something else.

 

The next part for the NeoPixel lights is figuring out the locations and mapping them in the code.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 7 years later...
  • 3 months later...

This is a great project I saw and liked it!

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     just fall

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