PhilipA
Experienced Member
Well, I've been enjoying my Portable I recently, but despite finding a stash of 5.25" floppy discs at work, they were all in kinda bad shape and generally didn't work, so I decided to bite the bullet and do an upgrade.
My Portable has been fairly well expanded over the years. It had a couple of full height 360k drives in the front. One worked fine but the feedback circuit for the servo speed control on the other was bad and the motor just ran at full tilt.
I came across a good 5.25" half-height drive, a fairly new 3.5" drive was found in my box of assorted junk, and an adapter was purchased for $7 off Amazon.
Took the 5.25" drive's face off, degreased and painted in satin black to match, fit it and the 3.5" drive in the right hand drive bay with a little bit of pfaff with the fixings.
This left a large, full-height gaping hole in the front of the computer.
Cut two rectangles of smoked plastic out and fitted them in place. Gutted my Cisco router, built a light interface board with a PWM circuit to dim the lights, fitted some very 70's warning lights in a stack, added a couple labels and hooked it all up inside, connecting the Ethernet to the router via a short wire.
20140328_163627 by renault9gta, on Flickr
Since added a shade to the photoresistor which allows only light from outside to affect the brightness. The bottom light was causing it to go bright!
All secured inside though I do need to grab a couple laptop antennas and mount them outside the cage, as reception isn't great, and having the antenna next to the cage causes the router to freak out and bring on the red light. Fixed that by turning that antenna off.
I don't think it looks too bad. Shame the HardCard doesn't have an output for an LED else I'd have run a wire to it also.
--Phil
My Portable has been fairly well expanded over the years. It had a couple of full height 360k drives in the front. One worked fine but the feedback circuit for the servo speed control on the other was bad and the motor just ran at full tilt.
I came across a good 5.25" half-height drive, a fairly new 3.5" drive was found in my box of assorted junk, and an adapter was purchased for $7 off Amazon.
Took the 5.25" drive's face off, degreased and painted in satin black to match, fit it and the 3.5" drive in the right hand drive bay with a little bit of pfaff with the fixings.
This left a large, full-height gaping hole in the front of the computer.
Cut two rectangles of smoked plastic out and fitted them in place. Gutted my Cisco router, built a light interface board with a PWM circuit to dim the lights, fitted some very 70's warning lights in a stack, added a couple labels and hooked it all up inside, connecting the Ethernet to the router via a short wire.
20140328_163627 by renault9gta, on Flickr
Since added a shade to the photoresistor which allows only light from outside to affect the brightness. The bottom light was causing it to go bright!
All secured inside though I do need to grab a couple laptop antennas and mount them outside the cage, as reception isn't great, and having the antenna next to the cage causes the router to freak out and bring on the red light. Fixed that by turning that antenna off.
I don't think it looks too bad. Shame the HardCard doesn't have an output for an LED else I'd have run a wire to it also.
--Phil
