Mac Mini inside a Powermac G4: Wiring
filed in Modifications on Jun.10, 2009
Following my previous Powermac-mini post, I would like to should you how I wired and coupled the mini to the powermac.
The challenge here was to have the ATX power-supply put inside the powermac to start at the same time the mini is started (and to stop when the mini stops) and also to get the front LED and buttons of the powermac to work with the mini. Grincheux’s dedicated blog powermacmini.wordpress.com gives all the info you need to do all that so I won’t go too much into details about it.
Bellow are pictures showing how I modified the original powermac quicksilver’s front buttons board in order to be able to wire it to the mini. The idea is to wire the power-button in parallel with the reset switch so that it’s easy to wire the reset wires to the on/off momentary connector on the mini’s main-board.
Then on the other side I wired the two unused wires on the 10 pin IDC connector straight to the LED.
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Conclusion
I am thrilled with this mod. The powermac quicksilver case looks stunning under my desk, I’ve got plenty of room for hard drives, the mini runs cooler and I can’t hear it any more (if you’ve got a mini sitting on your desk you know what I’m talking about)! Oh and I’ve got a PCI-express 1X expansion slot!
June 10th, 2009 on 19:36
What is your ATA to SATA adaptor ?
Seems nice.
June 10th, 2009 on 20:08
It took me ages to find the right thing, mainly because I wasn’t googling for the right keywords! Newmodus.com among others are selling ‘optical bay hardrive caddies’ that let you replace your laptop’s optical drive with a 2.5″ SATA hard-drive.
I used one of this with a SATA cable extentions to connect a second SATA device to the mini!