Minor modifications, and holes tapped

Today, I made a little more progress on the HTPC. I had to cut some bulges out of the bottom of the enclosure to clear the ATX motherboard I am using in this project. Here's a shot of that:



I tapped a few holes to put in the motherboard stand-offs to have something to mount the motherboard to. I had to do a little more hacking to get the motherboard mounted properly since the bottom of the enclosure is uneven. I used two plastic stand-offs that I cannibalized from the old DVD player, and I had to use some washers to move up one of the stand-offs. Otherwise, the motherboard went right in. I made sure to allow room for the adapter cards to fit. I'll need to cut some slot holes into the bottom of the enclosure to actually allow the tabs to go through the bottom. Here's a shot of the motherboard mounted for testing the fit:



So far so good, the hard part is going to be getting a DVD drive, a power supply, and a disk or two into the beast. I'm thinking about a slim-line DVD drive, so I'll do some searching for that tonight. I'll need to hack together some kind of mounting for that thing, and I think it will be tricky since I want to try and get the drive to line up with the original opening in the front of the enclosure. Just looking at it, I'm thinking I'll mount that on the right side of the opening. Next to that, I'll put in a hard disk stack. I'm thinking of a high capacity drive or two to be able to hold high-def PVR content. Finally, I'm planning on putting the power supply in the space next to the motherboard, on the side. I've seen some long thin power supplies that might work, but I might see what I can so with an "on-board" PSU, with an external brick.

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