I've been considering building a custom front panel for my on going build and I was wondering if anyone had some experience in this.
Getting PCBs made is extremely cheap nowadays and designing the front panel from scratch gives that sweet sweet full design freedom.
The power and reset buttons are simple, just short the pins somehow and you are good.
For the LEDs I've always used current limiting resistors in series just to be sure. I've tried to figure out if these are required as the LED pins might already be current limited on the motherboard. Does anyone know? I guess asking the motherboard manufacturer might be a good place to start.
Then the USB ports. It's kinda weird that I can't seem to find any documentation on this, but it seems as if you can just connect the pins to a header and you should be good to go. Might be a good idea to add some TVS diodes for ESD events, but as with the LEDs, there might already be sufficient functionality implemented in the motherboard.
Also, with USB3 you are working with very high frequency signals where shielding and impedance control of the PCB is something to consider. Something tells me this is not as straight forward as it might seem.
Thoughts on doing fully custom IO, let's call it breakout boards?
Getting PCBs made is extremely cheap nowadays and designing the front panel from scratch gives that sweet sweet full design freedom.
The power and reset buttons are simple, just short the pins somehow and you are good.
For the LEDs I've always used current limiting resistors in series just to be sure. I've tried to figure out if these are required as the LED pins might already be current limited on the motherboard. Does anyone know? I guess asking the motherboard manufacturer might be a good place to start.
Then the USB ports. It's kinda weird that I can't seem to find any documentation on this, but it seems as if you can just connect the pins to a header and you should be good to go. Might be a good idea to add some TVS diodes for ESD events, but as with the LEDs, there might already be sufficient functionality implemented in the motherboard.
Also, with USB3 you are working with very high frequency signals where shielding and impedance control of the PCB is something to consider. Something tells me this is not as straight forward as it might seem.
Thoughts on doing fully custom IO, let's call it breakout boards?