To the right you see the mod to date. The top monitor housing closes as easily as the original as it uses the native inverter and the native glass. Because I wanted this mod to be as close to the original as possible - I actually purchased a new monitor housing and base cover from ebay as most of the broken used iMacs I have acquired tend to be yellowed or scratched.
You can see the monitor from the front, side and back. To the right of that is the lcd controller and ECX motherboard. The ECX boots from a compact flash card located on the underside of the board.
The ECX board is the size of a 3.5" drive. My plan is to mount the ECX board on top of a blu ray drive in the native drive caddy. (essentially taking the place of the native hard drive). As the CPU fan will be sitting at the top of the dome, I will not need a fan, so I should be able to fit Wifi and Bluetooth at the top of the dome with the vent holes. As I will not be using the native power supply I should have room around the ECX board to fit connectors. The lcd controller board will replace the native iMac G4's motherboard at the bottom of the dome below the drive. As its smaller than the native motherboard I'm hoping to have room to wire up some rear I/O ports. The only downside is that this leaves no room from the power supplies for both the monitor and ECX board. They would fit in the drive caddy and using a splitter a simple AC plug could be placed in the back, but then obviously there would be no drive. I have thought about using the native iMac's power supply, but I really need the room and in a similar experiment I fried a different ECX board in the past.
So, I'm going to keep them external. For one the power supplies are small and this is a desktop computer, it won't be moved that much. Plus, I have always loved the drive and by using blu-ray it can be useful. Also, its gonna be tight in there and there is really no cooling system in place - so keeping hot power sources external is probably for the best.
I do think the system is likely to be hackintoshable - the chipset has been hackintoshed before (this is the Quanmax KEEX-4030 ECX board for those interested). The thing that I have never heard about is booting snow leopard from a compact flash card - a 2.5" or even 1.8" SSD may have to be shoehorned in somewhere if hackintosh is your goal.
Here is the system booting (again notice the small resolution during the boot that I previously discussed).
This is where the frustration set in - with windows booting. While I previously had a pristine image, after the resolder, the colors are unfortunately off. A multimeter revealed all intact connections but I was getting some week noise at the wrong pins - so I suspect some interference or crosstalk. I'm going to remove all the solder joints for the black wires and try redoing them with fresh connections and extra shielding.
To do this mod, I actually used cables from the necks of different iMacs. There are the black and grey cables that carry the DVI signal, however the apple cinema display has "extra wires". Some of these probably aren't necessary, but some of them are. As a result, I had to add an extra grey wire from a different iMac. I replaced the native LED/Microphone cable with this wire. The wiring is somewhat difficult to explain. If I continue to have difficulty with the black wire of the native iMac, I will likely change it to a different wire. Likely either the equivalent wires from the apple cinema display or another grey wire. Both of these choices would be MUCH easier to work with. Either way when I do finalize how I wire the neck, I will post specific instructions.
While I am quite proud of some of the previous mods - this mod is actually much simpler and besides having to push some wires through the neck, a lot less labor intensive than previous mods. In addition, if it does turn out, as it seems, that either LCD panel can be used, combinations of discarded iMac G4's and apple cinema displays can be used. I would NEVER tear apart a working iMac G4 and couldn't bring myself to tear open my mac mini to try to fit it in the base. I even hated even using a working apple cinema display in my previous mod. Its always great to re-purpose otherwise useless parts. But whats great about this mod is that there are so many different ways, but this one feels the closest to the native 20" iMac G4 that I've come so far.
Keep in mind that the KEEX-4030 uses the same Socket P Penryn Core 2 Duo chip thats in the previous and current generations of minis. This ECX board is no slouch. That said, if there was a problem with it, I think this is the mod that I would open up a mac mini for and try to put it in the base.
I'm hoping to figure out the wiring, clean up the image and start putting the base together this weekend. But, as always all comments and suggestions are appreciated, but please no comments about seeing windows on the iMac G4 - Its the only operating system I currently have on a compact flash card. Also feel free to ask any questions.
Hi Jon,
ReplyDeleteSo you used the native LCD screen, the native inverter and the LCD controller from an Apple Cinema Display, right? But why didn't you use the native LCD controller? You have posted before a way to convert this to DVI. So by doing that you could put the LCD controller into the LCD case too, right?
Can I use all the native things from an iMac G4 20" LCD (inverter, controller and screen) and just convert the signal just as you did with 17" model? That would be a great thing.
Thanks.
Juan.
There is no native controller it was integrated into the motherboard. Despite using the ACD LCD controller, the TMDS signaling cables go right from the DVI to the LCD - they don't go through the controller at all. The controller does one thing for me - it provides power. I never had a working iMac G5 power source and I could never figure out the voltages or amperage for the inverter. The only thing I knew for sure was there was at least one 24V line. Unlike the 15 and 17" which max out at 12V - so any atx power source will work. I took a few guesses and in the process killed 2 inverters and then stopped there. Now that I've actually got one working, I know the voltages. I could now calculate what resistors I would need and get it working using a 24V (2amp?) capable power source.
ReplyDeletePower sources that I know have a 24V line: iMac G4 20", iMac G5 20", and Apple Cinema Display 20" Controller + Power Brick. So you could trip the iMac G4 or G5 20" power source with a toggle switch and use its power lines. But, you need a working source or some other 24V line. So you need 3 12V for the monitor itself as noted in my pinout. Then you will need voltages of 24V, 3.3V, and 0.6mV. I will post the pinout for the inverter on my blog including the recommended resistor.
Even if I had a working 20" power source I would likely have still preferred this method via Apple Cinema Display as it handles all the voltages for you. Gives you a power and brightness control, and gives you USB/Firewire Ports. Plus besides the thin controller board, the actual power brick can be placed externally to save room in the base. I'll post the inverter pinouts to my blog.
To the right you see the mod to date. The top monitor housing closes as easily as the original as it uses the native inverter and the native glass lcd touch screen display.
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