Llamma's Green Sprocket Custom 360 Slim

Sure I'll do a custom for you for Christmas...  Oh boy what was I thinking!  This one was tough, I haven't missed a deadline yet but this one was close we shipped on the 22nd overnight and I was working on it right up until I found myself rushing off to the UPS store in time to meet the shipping cutoff!  With so many new mods we have never done before the difficulty was high and the room for error was slim.  (yeah pun intended!)

We started with a 4GB 360 Slim with Kinect, incorporated a custom cut DVD lid, and dual flush CNC V-carved windows, the windows are about as large as they can possibly be made without interfering with case assembly.  The ensemble was painted in green and sliver metal flake with auto body grade basecoat, clear coat paints.  The upper window sports a Charizard (pokemon) inspired tribal image created by Eternal Gamer, he gave us permission to use this image as part of the project check out this and his other work on deviantart.com 

The lower half of the window needed some venting and includes the gamertag "Sprocket" we went with a hexagon honeycomb vent grille to allow the console to breathe.  The windows were produced with a lip that allows them to be inset from the inside of the console and have the window fit flush to the surface of the case.  This is a big technical step that requires a perfect fit, the outline of the window and the case cut must be PERFECT or you end up with a big gap and it looks crappy or you have a window that doesn't fit in the hole so it took more than a few renditions to get it just right.  You may notice the corners of the window are quite sharp, they are actually 1/8 inch radius arcs and require using a tiny 1/8 inch bit in the router to get this level of detail.  It again ups the level of difficulty but produces a crisp shape with "square" corners.

The DVD lid was also custom windowed prior to receiving its sliver metal flake, we produced a tri spoke design that works with the slim DVD drive.  First a template was made in MDF and then the lid was cut on a table router at low RPM with a 4 fluted carbide end mill.  Using a table router to cut steel isn't "recommended" but if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail I guess.  In the end it actually works quite well.  But its probably worth mentioning "don't try this at home".

The console includes the new whisper slim from talismoon.  I'll be doing up a review on this at some point.  Its not a perfect replica and has a few fit issues, but hey what other options are there for a lighted slim fan?  At the moment none!  If your looking for one to include in your project we do offer them in the Llamma Shopping Cart  The fan ships with blue LED's installed but also includes red and green ones which install easily.  The fan's design incorporates the fan shroud in clear plastic so you get full visibility and nice air flow.

I do have a few complaints about the fan, while it installs and works fine, the holes in the fan don't quite lineup with the screw holes in the heatsink and the standoff nearest the DVD drive interferes with the case standoff next to the DVD but the biggest worry is the short peg in the lower corner (see above photo), if you were to tighten down the case screw fully you would do some serious damage to your case so be aware there will be about a 1/4 inch gap between the fan and the case standoff when installed.  Its not that big a deal as long as you don't torque down on the screw.  Overall it works fine but its a bit surprising to see this kind of inaccuracy in a product from Talismoon all their previous fans fit perfectly.  I have a feeling there was a lot of "CLOSE ENOUGH!  GET IT OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS" being thrown around.  We will look into the performance aspects further in an upcoming article.

The window was illuminated with seven 3mm pure green LED's.  I checked out some other options like the smart storm V2 which is plug and play on the slim but I just couldn't get a good side lighting effect I was looking for to make the tribal charizard pop out at you.  Custom wiring LED's is best method I know of to get a really dramatic lighting effect.  Hot glue, 3mm LED's, resistors, solder, 30AWG wire and away we go.  There is actually quite a bit of room at the top of the console to work in.  I did trace out one tab in yellow wax pencil near the middle of this photo just so I wouldn't put a glob of glue or bundle of wire in the wrong place.

Perhaps this isn't the best place to drop in a training session on how to wire LED's but what the heck I feel like writing at the moment and your still reading it apparently, and I did take the above photo so here we go.  We have 7 led's a 12V supply from the DVD drive of the console.  I like to use LEDcalc.com just plug in your numbers and it spits out a circuit and even includes a picture of the color bands on the resistor.  With green 3mm LEDs we want them to run with 3.2V at 20mA the calculator suggest breaking this into 3 circuits.  First 3 LED's in series, with a 120 ohm resistor, second another 3 led's with the same 120 ohm resistor and finally a single led with a 470 ohm resistor and that's exactly what I did, you'll see the three resistors encased in hotglue on the far left, only two wires leave this side of the lid and go to two wires on the DVD drive power cable.  The power comes in to the 3 resistors and each resistor has a wire heading to its appropriate LED(s).  The ground end of each series of leds was gathered to a single ground wire and twisted with the power wire and both were ran to the DVD power plug.  All the LEDs were first sanded flat to remove the beam focusing dome, this produces a nice wide spread of light rather than the narrow beam of a 15 degree led.  The LED's are then simply hotglued in place and at a few points along the wires we used our technique of adding a dab of hotglue, then quickly pressing the butt end of an aluminum xacto handle onto it to quickly cool and flatten the glue it just makes for easy routing of wires and keeping things tidy and in the places where they are supposed to be.

Notice the orange and black wire in the photo above.  The twisted pair of 30 AWG wire is so thin I could just eject the larger wires from the DVD power cable's connector and solder right to the steel crimp connector and then re-insert it into the plastic socket and make my connection to 12V power.  The bottom of the photo shows the outbound route of the wire.  Make sure to avoid the standoff pictured lower right.  This is actually a really convenient place to run wires, the wifi board is right there and it makes an easily accessible pocket.  With the two largest pieces of the case and faceplate installed, but without the vent caps installed, you have some room to poke around and move your wires into the desired position.

Working on this mod the biggest challenge was the thin strip of case between the two windows.  The only way to cut cases with the precision needed to bull's-eye a window insert and make a strip that thin is with a router table and template.  Once you cut the plastic that thin it gets really flexible.  So trying to cut a really flexible strip with a bit spinning at over 10 thousand of RPM it has a tendency to grab the plastic and pull it in and cut it extra thin at random.  I cut 4 practice cases prior to the one that you see in the photos, not one of them was acceptable.  I had  no idea if I could pull it off and had the painter coming by to pickup the parts within the hour.   I decided I had to give it another go and hope for the best.  I did have a bit of a brainstorm an found a better method that saved my butt and this one came out nice. 

The other part of this mod that took me by surprise was to find that if you want to paint the Kinect module you need to disassemble it completely, like COMPLETELY!  To get the upper shield of the base off you are in the business of removing circuit boards and standoffs and ultimately really disassembling the thing into a pile of parts.  And parts there are plenty of!  You'll find that in the base there is a spring loaded gear that will push off its accompanying washers when you disassemble it.  While re-assembling this little deal you will need to stack everything back on top of its spring and compress. 

If your like me you may find that your tweezers handle will slip off the washer and the spring will send all these little tiny parts flying across the room like some sort of little toy missile shooter.  It was one of those moments where time slows down, neooooow... I heard them bounce off the venetian blinds with a serene tinkling sound.  That was really nice, you just have to utter your best collection of curses and walk away...  Collect yourself and a flash light and crawl around on the floor for a half hour or so.  The washers were all brass so the rub a magnet trick wasn't going to do anyone any good.  I found every part and the little washers are something similar to the width of a #2 pencil lead and around 1mm thick.  Not fun, next time I will get a big plastic bag or some other container to do the reassembly inside for added protection.  I'll be adding a Kinect disassembly/reassembly tutorial as well now that I have a couple tricks to share.

Anyway I hope you like it.  We do offer to do customs from time to time.  This one came in at over 60 hours labor to complete.  This does include about 20 hours dedicated to fixtures and window templates that are reusable, so actual work on the console was more like 40 hours.  If you are interested in something special drop me a line and we will see what we can do for you.  Expect the price of a full custom like this one to be around the price of a decent used car, so most often this means we work for software companies rather than individuals.  If you have more time than money we are all about helping the do it yourselfers out there and we will also be offering our window cutting services in the coming weeks so look to the 360 page for an announcement or to the services section of the shopping cart where our new case cut and window options will be listed when available.

-Llamma