The Lan-Bus Guide

Mod Name : Lan-Bus
Estimated Time required: 5 hours
Tools Required: Needle Nose Pliers, Screwdriver, Electrical tape, Drill, Dremel, pencil, Ruler, Paint, Soldering Iron, Rosin Core Solder, File/Sand paper, Hot glue gun, exacto knife
Hardware required: 5 1/4 drive bay blank ( I took one out of an old 286), Hub (I used a 5-port Linksys), some wire and 7 Led's


Step 1: The first thing you have to do is measure the area of the ports on the back of the Hub. Then draw a rectangle matching those measurements onto your drive plate. This is the area your going to need to cut out.

Remember to measure twice and cut once.


Step 2: Fire up your dremel tool, (or your personal cutting tool of choice) and cut out the area you measured off. Take some sand paper or a file and sand off any of the rough edges when your done. Now would be a good time to take apart your hub and test the fit in the hole you cut. You should have something like this. Don't worry if it's a little rough around the edges.

Cut another hole for the power plug to extend through.



Step 3: Put the hub, (with its caseing now removed), into the hole you cut. Now with your pencil mark a dot approx 1cm above each of the jacks. Get out your drill and find a drill bit the same size as the LED's your planning on useing and drill out these dots that you made on the face plate. Be sure to remove the hub cartridge from the drive before drilling your holes duh.

Step 4: Now that you have your holes drilled, clear away any of the loss plastic and test fit one of your LED's into each of the holes you have drilled to make sure that it fits nice and snug. Once your satisfied whith the fit you can move on and Paint your drive plate. Remove any LED's and the hub itself from the drive plate and paint it to color match your case. This isn't really a required step but it does make the drive look a lot nicer when finished.

Step 5: Now that your paint is drying we move on to the most difficult step in the mod soldering the the LED's onto the hub's pcb. If your experienced with a soldering iron this may not take you long at all. I took my time and spent roughly 1 1/2 hours cutting all of the wire and soldering on my LED's. This is also not really a required step but it really adds to the overall look of the drive bay and it's nice to be able to read the LED's if you ever run into network problems. There are 7 LED's in total that need to be soldered. I find it helps if you tape the wires to the board with a piece of electrical tape to help hold them in place while your soldering. When your done you should have something similar to this.

Top


Bottom


Step 6: After soldering the wires I got to thinking that it would be a good idea to somhow protect the solder points. If you have a dust cover off an old N64 game it will fit perfectly over the end of the pcb. The hub is almost the exact size of an N64 cart. Unfortunetly I didn't have a dust cover anywhere so I improvised and went ghetto. I cut a piece of plastic out of a 2L pop bottle and bent it around the end of the cartridge and used zip ties to hold the plastic in place. This should keep the soldered wires from coming into contact with anything.

It's a good idea to wait until step 9 before zipping your zip ties in place. Just leave them open for now.



Step 7: At this point in the mod I got on my computer and created a decal for the front of the faceplate. I wanted it to dress up the front of the plate by helping to give it a more "finished look", and it also comes in handy by providing information on port activaty. I printed the decal off on some sticky paper and placed it on the front of the drive plate.I think it turned out pretty good.
What a time to run out of colored ink.


Here is the drive bay decal template if you would like to print one off for your drive. Just click this link.

Step 8: Now cut out the center of the decal with the exacto knife and do another test fit of the hub into the face plate. This is your last chance to make sure everything fits right so it would be a good idea to make sure all of your LED wires are long enough to reach the holes on the drive bay plate.

Rear view of near finished product.


Step 9: Now that everything fits it's a good idea to apply some glue to make sure it's going to stay in place. Pull the hub out of the faceplate slightly and add a small bead of hot glue along the front of the hub's pcb just below the ports. Press firmly into place against the faceplate and your finished. Now sit back and admire your work.

The finished product.


Installed in the computer


Now you have yourself a Lan-bus. It's nice to have when your going to a lan party, just incase you need the extra ports and it's a lot more handy then carting around the hub seperatly. Looks cooler too.