Finishing Touches and Ports

Although, I was disappointed by the limitation in operating system - I'm still excited that this is a true 20" all-in-one complete with blu-ray drive.  So, I want to make it as professional as possible.  I took the base apart to better secure everything.  Here you can see the ECX board elevated and secured to the Blu-ray drive.  I am using the native drive caddy - but did have to dremel off the top part of it to make room for the board.

As the CPU fan fits right under the dome I elected not to add an additional case fan.  There is no hard drive or power source and this is a low power consumption board, but I may revisit this depending on my cpu temps.  I had also initially placed a wifi card at the top of the dome, but the reception was too poor, so I have removed this and will use an external usb card.

For ports, I have chosen to use mostly extenders.  I find wires easier to deal with than circuits.

To cement things into place modeling clay/epoxy works well.  There are multiple kinds, but the basic idea is to mix equal parts to two compounds which begin to harden when combined.

The first thing I secured was the power button, placing a small momentary switch right behind the native iMac G4's power button.

The Right sided ports were where the ethernet, modem, and audio jacks were for the native iMac G4.  I have replaced these with a ethernet splitter and the power led, hdd led.  In the picture below you do see an audio header, which I was originally going to use, however, the ECX board uses a pin layout that I was unfamiliar with.   So I held off audio out for now and incorporated the two led lights.

The left sided ports consisted of 2 fire wires, 3 USB and a display out.  I opened up the display port somewhat to allow another USB port.  Because I am worried about power constraints (I'm using a 60 watt power supply).  I wanted to make sure I used some powered USB slots.  Fortunately I have another power supply coming into the base in the form of the Apple Cinema Display.  The controller gives 2 USB outs.  So two from the mobo and 2 from the cinema display = 4 total.  The firewire ports i am leaving empty for now.  The cinema display does allow for 2 firewire connections and I could add a firewire PCI express at some point.  I was also thinking about cutting a hope between these and putting an HDMI extender for use as a second monitor when needed.

Now that I have the basic layout I apply the molding.  It usually takes a good 24 hourse to harden.  I will use the center for the two power supplies.  The DC for the motherboard will be a simple plug, but unfortunately because there is no female version of the cinema display power, I am likely going to have to simply "run the cable out the back".

 So I place the drive caddy with bluray and ECX and secure it as it was designed to be.  After the ports dry I will secure them to the bottom of the dome, secure the Apple cinema display's LCD controller to the bottom and close the base.

As always, questions and comments are welcomed.  But, this should be complete within the next few days.

Hackintosh Blues

Now that the large hardware assembly was completed I was able to move onto the small hardware components and software.  As I have said before I myself don't love hackintoshes, but I did want to give it a shot with this computer to make it as close to the original as possible.

Courtesy of Logic Supply

I was worried about using a compact flash as my primary hdd and  it turned out to be justified as no matter what bootloader I used or how I formated the partition, I could not get the snow leopard DVD to recognize the drive.  The KEEX motherboard does have 2 sata ports, but only one sata power connector which is an a single connector tied to the first sata port.  However, with a SSD power use would be minimal so splitting the sata power should not be a problem.  Although it is a tight fit in the dome, I am able to fit probably a 2.5" ssd, but to play it safe I was looking into 1.8" drives.  However, before I payed for the drive I wanted to make sure there would  not be any problems with the hackintosh build but very quickly I learned that the onboard graphics is likely to be a major problem.

As you can see the board uses GMA 4500MHD graphics (Intel GM45 chipset).  I believe this is intels equivalent to the ion 2 platform.  Now with significant hacks it appears people have been able to force resolution in snow leopard to get above the default resolution, but there are still major problems and to my knowledge no one has been able to enable Quartz Extreme/Core Image with this chipset.  So, I could either 1) Buy the SSD  and install snow leopard the best that I can.  2) Use the PCI-express x 4 with an ion graphics card (this will likely requiring removing the hard drive as it is unlikely to fit as is.  3) Hold off for now - formally install windows or linux and wait to see if a solution presents itself.  As I've already spent FAR too much money on this mod, I've decided to hold off and work with Windows or Linux for now.

But, please if anyone has any knowledge about either the issue of booting snow leopard from a compact flash drive or the Intel GMA4500HD graphics problem help would be appreciated.  Thanks.