Part 12 - zooooOOOwIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIieeeeeooow

In which Mr Dremel is unleashed

I've had an email asking me when I think I'll be finished. The answer is I'm not sure but I'd guess another couple of weeks. The build has taken months but actually it hasn't been that much work. I'm not in a hurry and I guess I'm averaging less than 1 hour a day on it. I'm doing it at work during my lunch hour and I've done some after-hours on it as well. There has been a certain amount of trial and error. I reckon it's taken 30 hours so far, but that's a wild guess. So much time is spent figuring things out that actual build time is

Any road up, back to the plot. I spent an hour on Monday trying out different arrangements of boards in bottom of the Wacom case. I didn't want to spend a lot of time extending connectors. I'm wary of the possibility of picking up interference and also the increased chance of a bad connection at some point, not that I'm paranoid about my soldering skills or anything.

There are of course a number of constraints. The inverter is 10mm thick which limits the placement somewhat, I want to use the existing screw holes to fasten the main board , (which is components down) It needs to be ultra secure to cope with having stuff plugged and unplugged lots. This leaves the screen driver board on the right looked at from the front. After trying out a number of arrangements I decided on this one.

I'm going to have to extend the connector between the inverter and the main board but I have a spare if it doesn't work I'll try that before I start cutting anything. An hour of cutting twisting and soldering later and it still works. HUZZAH

Mark everything out and start cutting. The slot cutter makes short work of cutting some reasonably straight lines, smartened up a bit afterwards with a file. I leave some small tabs to locate the boards a bit more securely.

Sweet innit?

HINDSIGHT WARNING
Sweet except I put the inverter the wrong way round. What I didn't realise at this point is that (alledgedly) you can't easily extend the cables from the inverter to the lights, you end up losing brightness. I had to reposition the inverter later to account for this.

HINDSIGHT WARNING Pt2
The knowledgable Ambidextrose has informed us that extending wires from the inverter to the backlights is indeed possible. More details over on the forum, come on over and ask.