Log Deskmini x300 "Turbine", a 12vDC brickless Vehicle build

[msystems]

The original "Turbine" build

Build Log

1. Vehicle interior and usable space
2. Deskmini x300
3. x300 initial performance analysis
4. x300 modification #1, pt1
5. x300 modification #1, pt2
6. 12v conversion
7. Egpu musings
8. Tuning, active memory cooling, updated gaming benchmarks
9. Making the rig into a crypto miner for warmth and profit

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Original Discussion Post

Before I start spending $$$ I'm wondering if anyone has tried running a SFF system directly from their 12v/24v vehicle house batteries. I'm increasingly living in my vehicle these days and see no reason why I shouldn't make this switch.

I am planning to make a vehicle based sffpc, using straight DC from house batteries, since it has a number of advantages.
First, it should be more efficient than an AC system by preventing Inverter loss (although, voltage drop in the wires must be watched).
It also will be better on thermals. An internal AC-DC produces a lot of waste heat. An external DC-DC step-up converter won't produce much heat at all.
It will also be removable from the vehicle and can be connected to an external AC-DC Psu for use in the home.

The concept of the build is as follows:

Total system TDP: 250-300w, undervolting as necessary. In my experience, thermals/noise become increasingly bad as you start going above 200w on air
GPU: RTX 1060Ti Mini (200w TDP, but much less after undervolt. 850mv on Ampere seems to be a typical undervolt while sustaining factory clock)
CPU: TBD
Case: TBD. I only have 1 foot of vertical space, so ideally I'd need a Cube case that is exactly the footprint of a mITX board.

Electrical specs
It's a 12v system. 24v would be better but my battery bank and appliances are already configured for 12v.
-200AH Lifepo4 to stay within a healthy .2c discharge rate and lots of runtime
-Wiring - Power needs are 25 Amps@12v. I have a 10GA copper run already in place which I plan to fuse at 35A. It's more voltage drop than optimal.. but OK
-A 12->24v step up converter, 25a@24v rating (600w nominal) such as this. This is outside the case, but only inches away for the lowest voltage drop.
-Some sort of DIY soldering job on the step-up output, to create a male barrel connector compatible with the HDplex one
-HDplex 400w dc-atx accepting the 24v input


I don't think it will be that hard but I anticipate the tricky parts will be choosing a good step up converter, making the barrel connector, and confirming my wiring is not getting too warm. There's also a concern that vibration could damage it. Possibly would need to engineer some kind of anti-vibration mounting with foam or rubber grommets for the case. Also due to the vibration, I wonder if using a GPU riser would be better or worse. Im inclined to think that using a GPU riser-based case would be better than the gpu contacts constantly bouncing around in the fixed pci-e connector.

 

[Goatee]

Are you tied to the 1660ti?

I have a travel build that takes 12v straight to the board (no 19v / 12v conversion) and is ~150w at full draw and the size of a hardback book.


This uses some pretty weird parts but is minimal work with nothing really fancy.

 

[msystems]

Are you tied to the 1660ti?

I have a travel build that takes 12v straight to the board (no 19v / 12v conversion) and is ~150w at full draw and the size of a hardback book.


This uses some pretty weird parts but is minimal work with nothing really fancy.

This is awesome. Could you go into detail about how you are delivering the power to the board? Are you using a 12v dc-atx like a Pico? I have heard of those 12v Pico before but I believe they have a bit less juice so I would need to trim down the power draw a ways.

One thing I'd have to consider if going this route is that it would mean finding a new 12v brick for AC if it was brought inside to run off mains, whereas the 19v laptop bricks are ubiquitous and can be adapted to hdplex

 

[confusis]

The concerns I would have (I've had a carPC in my dreams for a long term) is the voltage. Most 12V Pico-PSU variants just pipe the 12V straight through to the board. This would mean that when the alternator is charging the battery, the board is seeing 13.8-14v! Cranking the engine drops the voltage significantly too. If you have a standalone battery for accessories (think high end car audio style setup), you may be able to get away with it, as a properly configured engine battery to accessory battery feed would limit voltage variances.

"Wide Input" 12V Pico-PSU and similar tend to max out at 200W or thereabouts, alas.

Seeing as you are looking at upconverting 12V to 24V or similar, you may be able to find a power solution that works for that - 19V truck based laptop charger, etc. It does seem wasteful to go from 12 => 24 => 12/5/3.3V, though. Your linked 12-24 seems like a solid solution - and may indeed be the best option. The HDPlex accepts 16-30V so you're right in the sweet spot.

Regarding vibration dampening - remember cars have had optical disk readers in them for some time - a few rubber grommets and making sure the mounts are well designed - should work fine... Assuming the card's heatsink doesn't weigh tooo much.

In my instance, I have a couple of 12V to 230V 350W inverters spare that I was going to lean on to make life easy (I have one running a server in my solar powered carport -350WH of 12V SLA, "400"W of panels, and a 45w server doing hardly anything. Oh, and charging my DIY e-bike each night.)


What is your monitor/screen solution?

 

[msystems]

Thanks for the ideas. To use Pico it sounds like I'd have to cut down the GPU options to hit 200w safely. But also since you mention it, the voltage could be questionable because of the battery chemistry which "likes" to be at about 13.6v. The battery system is isolated from the starter battery so the alternator isn't an issue, but it's the charger voltage at 14.4v. Estimating a .6v voltage drop on load from the DC wiring, the Pico would still be getting input of as high as 13.8v which could be out of spec.

For the screen I'm going to try to take my existing Dell U2415 (AC powered so this will be on inverter) and put it on an Ergotron arm and mount it in there for fun, since I haven't seen anyone try to put an Ergotron arm in a vehicle yet and I don't know why cause it seems cool as hell. I'll have to engineer some kind of tie-down system to secure it when driving so the arm doesn't swing around and break stuff. Ideally it can rotate and swivel up right against an empty portion of the wall to be secured.

 

[msystems]

Although I won't have an actual PC in this setup for a few months (as its increasingly likely I will go with a laptop + an eGPU later for practicality) I should have a few things to show off here soon at least, in terms of the ergonomics, and later this week my plan/experiment of wiring a 14v Samsung monitor directly off lithium house batteries for efficiency's sake and avoiding the "double-inverter loss" which all home-based electronic systems suffer from when you run them in a vehicle.

I spent an enormous amount of time searching for ideal monitors with DC bricks that would be a good fit and settled on this one as it has reasonable color gamut, refresh, weight, VESA, and isn't too expensive. There were also some good 19v candidates but that would require a 12v to 19v boost converter, whereas this might(?) work without any additional voltage conversion, which is super awesome.

Also in case anyone is wondering, all of Dell's monitors use internal PSUs, ruling them out. Also almost every high-end IPS I could find also used internal PSUs such as Asus ProART ect.

This monitor comes with an external AC-DC brick which i'll be splicing and adding xt-60 connectors on it, so I can then use it via straight DC hardwire, but still have AC as a fallback option. The advantage is not only the power efficiency but the weight savings, especially on a triple-extended Ergotron arm where 9lbs vs. 6lbs is kind of a big deal as that weight is subject to movement, vibration, ect.

I can't find much information about the voltage tolerances of a typical monitor, but im hoping it is designed for at least a 5% voltage tolerance window, giving me a working range of 13.3v - 14.7v which is the typical voltage of my Lithium bank. I don't know much about how the voltage spikes might affect it though, as the monitor will be sharing the batteries with many other devices and there could be minor fluctuations. I guess we will find out.

 

[msystems]

A few pics of the current setup and the cabinet for potential SFF pc or eGPU to go in. The monitor is running straight off the house batteries with no power conversion (it was just a cabling job really). If you want the details on that, i've posted a thread in Mods that goes into a lot of detail about it. The result is the monitor only uses about 12 watts which is quite good.

Some pics of the ergos and entire setup

This is the ridiculous Ergotron LX with an additional extension arm. I decided to go for it since it seemed like no one else tried it in a vehicle yet. It can hold 18lbs but the supporting "table" has problems way before that. I removed the 9lbs Dell and it's doing much better with this 6lbs Samsung monitor now.

Here is the space below I have to work with. 12.5" laptop for reference. I'm sure we can figure out how to fit an SFF pc in there.

 

[confusis]

f'n amazing. Honestly, a laptop with an eGPU would be a better choice - means you have portability outside of the vehicle. power the eGPU from the house batteries as well, and have it form a kind of "dock" for when at "home".

What you're missing though is speakers. In such a small space you could create an epic atmosphere for gaming!

 

[msystems]

What you're missing though is speakers. In such a small space you could create an epic atmosphere for gaming!

Just using a bluetooth speaker which is ok when placed inside the cabinet. The resonance with the wood makes it decent enough, sort of like a ported box sound.

Egpu potential is very exciting and will likely be a custom enclosure solution to favor a DC source, meaning a sandwich sized enclosure omitting both the ac dc as well as the dc atx.

Im inspired by @REVOCCASES .6L Sandwich build which was shared in discord https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/704501382312493057/945648606256439406/1645530589211.jpg
(Above image and all credit to REVOCCASES')
Its just a pcie riser sitting on top of a M2 to TB adapter. Sweet and simple.

Something like this can take regulated 12v input directly from a dc-dc converter (custom atx pass through wiring) with no internal dc-Atx necessary. My understanding is no 3.3v or 5v rails are necessary. Or alternatively, it could take a wider input on a barrel connector, and break it down via a HDplex 400 or dynamo (rip) into the enclosure. For that option i would step up to 24v because those dc-atx do not accept under 16v (although, there are less powerful dc atx that are wide input).

For greater, compatibility, some kind of atx pass-through would be ideal.

Edit: In terms of the system to run it, any modern tb3+ laptop should, but for the best value and to avoid throttling, Intel NUC is looking as the most attractive option, especially the versions which can take 12-24v wide input right to the board.

 

[confusis]

The speaker solution makes sense - although I was thinking a quartet of thin car audio speakers inset into your vehicle's interior panels

That's a rugged looking eGPU box, should be ideal.

Also, I never asked, what's the vehicle? Would be interesting to look into as to space and cubbies/storage

 

[msystems]

Small update

I have been debating between different "mobile" platforms with Thunderbolt (for eGPU), most of which are using Intel's i7 1165g7 (mobile) processor, as there were some different advantages to each approach:

1. Laptops - X1 Carbon / X13 / T14 / XPS13 (Integrated graphics, 19v)
2. Nuc Pro ("Tiger Canyon", Integrated graphics, DC 12-24v wide input) [Note: EOL & discontinued by Intel]
3. Nuc Enthusiast ("Phantom Canyon", RTX 2060 mobile, 19v)

All of these would have worked. But after some deliberation (and really, discovering what was possible from some detailed build logs as well as some benchmarks and reports on this forum) I decided to go with Asrock's x300 platform paired with Ryzen 5xxx series.

Not only does it destroy everything above in performance, but it also only uses a few more watts than a laptop at idle despite having a desktop processor. Some people have reported idle power draw as low as 7 watts, which is absolute bonkers compared to my mITX desktop rig, which (even undervolted) is about 35 watts. In addition to this, it has a wide DC12-19v input, as confirmed by two members on this forum, and still has the capability for an eGPU over m.2, although it will take some fabrication to integrate the GPU, which is fine. So, the only real sacrifice I can see is that some mobility is lost when compared to a laptop, but why do something as boring as to getting another laptop when I can cut the x300 case up like swiss cheese and maybe use my 3d printer a bit?

The speaker solution makes sense - although I was thinking a quartet of thin car audio speakers inset into your vehicle's interior panels

That's a rugged looking eGPU box, should be ideal.

Also, I never asked, what's the vehicle? Would be interesting to look into as to space and cubbies/storage

I will eventually do a write up on the features of the vehicle, both a summary of the electrical systems and the storage features, but it's basically a plain looking Ford Transit Connect, intended to look just as unremarkable from the outside as a plumber's work truck found all across the globe, while actually having the capabilities to live off grid for up to 2 months. The space inside is limited, so it is using a sliding bench layout, with a cabinet opposite.

 

[confusis]

Looks innocent, but you may confuse people when they hear excited gaming voice chat "kill him!""haha pwnd"etc as they walk by



Great choice on the X300 platform. I tried 12V on the A300 and it worked great!

 

[jakejm79]

IME I have found the Xe graphics (specifically the 96EU unit in the i7) outperforms the Vega iGPU in the AMD APUs, when running at the same wattage.
The reason you'll see most benchmarks scoring the AMD higher is because the benchmarks are taken from a desktop system running at 65W+ and most 11X5G7 benchmarks are from laptops running around 15-28W.
Unless you need all the cores/threads that an AMD APU offers, for watt to watt and thread to thread the Tiger Lake will outperform it.

 

[bigmeanie]

I made an account just to reply to this (I was looking for a supplier of thin mini motherboards like those found in the beelink mini pc)

I've done the solar/rv thing off and on for years and you are going to need one solid dc-dc converter between you and your battery, just for filtration, and honestly I normally suggest a local battery bank close to your machine, all other things aside it limits the surge loads you are going to be putting on your car's electrical system.

Now, this is the setup I use and YMMV may differ some.
Link
Link
I'll use that 13.8 volt out (with in range of 8- 40 volts) dc to dc converter followed by that buck power supply to charge my local power wall. I'll do it 3 series and normally something like 20 parallel. which incidentally will make a brick about the size of a laptop. In my case I was using a step-up to 19 volts and kept the laptop brick under a laptop and that normally kept me in about 2-5 days of playtime on just batteries. Also this lets you use panels and auto voltage without having to panic attack about matching voltages.

Your brick you are going to make with these holders,
Link you really do want your cells to be removeable, I hate to say it but anymore the fail rate for individual cells is really high and the ability to just remove the offender and replace it is going to save you in the $$$
Which brings us to the next part.

this 3s Link protection board is going to prevent you from over discharging your batteries, and you are going to use this active charge balancer to keep your batteries from drifting apart in levels Link

It is a major problem with DIY rigs, you are going to have cells from questionable sources, your cells are also going to have unequal current draws from them due to real world physics being a dork, very often what happens is you get one cell that starts to go and it ends up causing all sorts of problems in the rest of the cells without those two above measures.


Also invest in a cheeptastic thermal camera if you plan to build a power wall, they are legit one of the best troubleshooting devices for that as it will let you quickly find the problem cell 90% of the time without having to do any real testing.

 

[msystems]

Welcome! I have thought about making a smaller, dedicated pack like you suggest. Some have actually done so on this forum to create portable VR rigs, ect, or just used off the shelf Rc LIPOs. There are a lot of advantages like you said. Less voltage drop, ability to service the batteries, less ripple, and potentially, gain the ability to take the pack (and mini-pc) completely mobile, depending on the size of the pack.

However I want to clarify that in my setup, nothing is running from the starter battery or is subjected to the alternator noise. I already have an isolated, 2.5kwh (12.8v x 200ah) lithium house battery with internal BMS, typical resting voltage of 13.2v, and 14.4v charge voltage. I'm hoping to pull directly from this bank to the board which tolerates wide 12-19v. I assume there is some ripple due to the other DC appliances on the circuit as well as the solar charger, but I am hoping it is OK. Maybe a bad assumption but I don't have an oscilloscope, just voltage meters which aren't accurate enough to show the instantaneous voltage dips. The only thing that kind of concerns me is the fridge compressor that engages occasionally. I would like to find or make a soft-start circuit for it but I don't have any electrical engineering experience.

For those components that need actual, ATX-compliant specification "Regulated 12v" (i.e., an eGPU), I am still searching for the most ideal buck/boost solution because typical DC-ATX I have found are either 11.4-12.6v input or 16v-30v input, so I can either step up to 19v, or down to 12v, both of which have different pros/cons (which would have been avoided on a native 24v system).

There is one wide-input automotive 12dc-atx by MiniBox, which is designed exactly for this application (I think it was REVOCCASES which has found it), but it only offers 8 amps on 12v rail which is a bit unsuitable for modern PC. https://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX-160w-Intelligent-Automotive-DC-DC-Power-Supply

CPU and Board Support
-VIA X86 CPUs, PII, PIII and low po P4/AMD*
-Supports all VIA mini-ITX motherboards
*NOTE: Check the total 12V rail power consumption

Its kind of a relic

 

[bigmeanie]

Welcome! I have thought about making a smaller, dedicated pack like you suggest. Some have actually done so on this forum to create portable VR rigs, ect, or just used off the shelf Rc LIPOs. There are a lot of advantages like you said. Less voltage drop, ability to service the batteries, less ripple, and potentially, gain the ability to take the pack (and mini-pc) completely mobile, depending on the size of the pack.

However I want to clarify that in my setup, nothing is running from the starter battery or is subjected to the alternator noise. I already have an isolated, 2.5kwh (12.8v x 200ah) lithium house battery with internal BMS, typical resting voltage of 13.2v, and 14.4v charge voltage. I'm hoping to pull directly from this bank to the board which tolerates wide 12-19v. I assume there is some ripple due to the other DC appliances on the circuit as well as the solar charger, but I am hoping it is OK. Maybe a bad assumption but I don't have an oscilloscope, just voltage meters which aren't accurate enough to show the instantaneous voltage dips. The only thing that kind of concerns me is the fridge compressor that engages occasionally. I would like to find or make a soft-start circuit for it but I don't have any electrical engineering experience.

For those components that need actual, ATX-compliant specification "Regulated 12v" (i.e., an eGPU), I am still searching for the most ideal buck/boost solution because typical DC-ATX I have found are either 11.4-12.6v input or 16v-30v input, so I can either step up to 19v, or down to 12v, both of which have different pros/cons (which would have been avoided on a native 24v system).

There is one wide-input automotive 12dc-atx by MiniBox, which is designed exactly for this application (I think it was REVOCCASES which has found it), but it only offers 8 amps on 12v rail which is a bit unsuitable for modern PC. https://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX-160w-Intelligent-Automotive-DC-DC-Power-Supply



Its kind of a relic

Maybe 4 of these in parallel if you wanted to have a wide input voltage range and still meet your power requirement. I've used those to run video cards and they do pretty alright all things considered, and these do have some pretty decent efficiency.

 

[msystems]

x300 is here from Aliexpress, it took about 1 month. Unfortunately the brick came with a Chinese plug, and I don't seem to have the right cord with the IEC 60320 C5 plug on the end right now. Might just chop up the one it came with tomorrow. Anyway, can't really do much now until I figure out the plug so just took a few pictures.


Obligatory stuff shot:

It was a little expensive to get this ram kit, but the >15% performance over DDR3200 will be worth it assuming it can successfully clock up to at least DDR3600 and hopefully 4000. I forget which user here did those benchmarks, but I saved their screenshot. I'm also hoping to sell selling the other Sodimm pair here to for anyone else building an x300 and recover half of the cost.

The x300's stock cooler looks like something you'd find on a Pentium 4. The Wraith Stealth is actually pretty nice size and would look good (if it fit).

Edit 3/28/22-
Diy plug now complete and the system is running.

More than enough room!

 

[msystems]

I have had a few days to test out this system, now I can say it is probably my favorite system ever. It's just so compact yet very capable in many areas. Although it's far from perfect, the value is very good everything considered. Perhaps it is a glimpse of the future as well. With the RDNA2 APU versions of the mini STX formats coming later this year, the platform will be even more capable and other manufacturers are producing more mini PCs. Makes me wonder if I would even need to build in ITX format again.

What follows is going to be a summary/review of my performance observations of the x300/5700g. This will not really be news to anyone familiar with Ryzen APUs and the a300/x300, as it's already been discussed but it's just some more documentation and to provide foundation for the next posts.

The first thing worth mentioning is power draw.

Asrock supplied a 120w adapter, but with the 8 core 5700g, the system can pull 140 watts on loads that aren't entirely unrealistic. If all cores are loaded, and then the GPU needs to do anything, it's going to push it over 120w. Some multithreaded games could approach this draw. This issue gets worse as memory is pushed higher and SOC voltage has to be slightly bumped. For this reason I decided to disable SMT (multithreading) for thermal and power delivery safety reasons until I figure a way to deal with both. A few people have said that the 5600g is perfect for this platform and I would have to agree. With a 5600g it lowers the thermal and power demands enough to be comfortable.

Once converted to run on 12v, there will be enough power, but then the issue becomes amperage to the DC plug, which will increase from a maximum 7.3a @ 19v to 10.7a @ 13v, which is quite a lot of amps to put through that plug.

X300, Ryzen 5700g 8c/16t @ DDR4200. Amd says temp spikes like this are normal for Ryzen 5000, and don't be afraid of 95c
​

The second thing is the temps. The internal thermal resistance of Ryzen with it's chiplet layering design (and placed off-center on the die) seems to cause these massive temp spikes like nothing I have seen before. Even at completely stock settings it did not matter which cooler I used, both the stock cooler and Noctua still had instantaneous 30c temp spikes. I ended up just setting the fan curve very aggressively at 50c to arrest the spikes. I will try a few other things, like Lapping and re-applying paste, but apparently this is normal. Generally temps under heavy load were in the high 70s, slowly creeping into the 80s after extended periods. It's also worth mentioning here that the x300's case design cooks the memory. It is placed at the bottom of the case with no ventilation and I suspect this can impact performance when pushing the memory.


Gaming performance:

Image Quality Screenshots
Witcher 3 720p high 900p high 1080p low 1080p high​

I ran a few tests at stock memory speed, then bumped the memory to 2000mhz, 2100mhz, and finally added a small GPU OC and stopped at a SOC voltage of 1.2v. It either needs more voltage or more relaxed memory timings to go further than this.

Spoiler: Results in text format


Stock cpu clock and boost

DDR3200 18-19-19-39, 1600mhz infinity
2000mhz gfx
Witcher Low 1080p - 33fps
Witcher High, Hairworks off 720p - 42fps
Cinebench r23 multi - 11081
Heaven Extreme 4.0 - Avg 21.1, Min 13.5, Max 47.5
Soc: Auto

DDR4000 18-19-19-39, 2000mhz infinity
2000mhz gfx
Witcher Low 1080p - 37fps
Witcher High, Hairworks off 720p - 47fps
Cinebench r23 multi - 11136
Heaven Extreme 4.0 - Avg 24.0, Min 15.7, Max 54.4
SoC: 1.1v

DDR4200 18-19-19-39, 2200mhz infinity
2000mhz gfx
Witcher Low 1080p - 41fps
Witcher High, Hairworks off 720p - 49fps
Cinebench r23 multi - 11261
Heaven Extreme 4.0 - Avg 25.5, Min 16.3, Max 56.4
Soc: 1.16v

DDR4200 18-19-19-39, 2200mhz infinity
2100mhz gfx
Witcher High 1080p - 31fps
Witcher Low 1080p - 42fps
Witcher High, Hairworks off 720p - 50fps
Cinebench r23 multi - n/a
Heaven Extreme 4.0 - skip
Soc: 1.17v

DDR4200 18-19-19-39, 2200mhz infinity
2200mhz gfx
Witcher High 1080p - 31fps
Witcher Low 1080p - 43fps
Witcher High, Hairworks off 720p - 51fps
Cinebench r23 multi - n/a
Heaven Extreme 4.0 - Avg 26.4, Min 16.8, Max 59.2
Soc: 1.2v


Basically memory speed is everything, but still need more! It's good enough for 1080p in some games but in others it's better using 720p.
Witcher 3 runs quite well at 720p High.

Single core performance isn't great but it's good enough for adding an eGPU and getting respectable performance. It's not going to match the efficiency of new mobile Intel processors but has respectable performance against older generation desktop parts. The x300 allows CPU overclocking, but there isn't much headroom to do so after bumping the memory up, which is more important anyway. This is one area where a NUC or laptop would have made more sense if I was sure an eGPU would be added.

The 5700g basically has ridiculous multi-thread performance. More than I need most of the time, so as I mentioned earlier, I turned off SMT. Turning off SMT has a substantial impact on performance, about 30% on a full multi-core load, but after bringing up the memory to compensate, it isn't that huge of an impact compared to the stock 5700g at DDR3200 speeds. A 5600g is very similar to a 5700g with disabled SMT.

I settled on the following settings for now:

CPU - Stock clocks, Auto VID, Auto PBO, Disable SMT (Hyperthreading)
SOC - 1.17v
Memory - 2100mhz
Infinity Fabric - 2100mhz
GPU - Stock

What's next for this build: It involves a jigsaw...

 

[msystems]

Ok, after only two days it was getting hard to resist just cutting a hole in the side, so I just got it over with and got out the trusty jigsaw and did some damage.

Spoiler: "x300 Modification #1"

The plan was to design a duct and shroud to cover the rest of the side holes so there is no circular airflow, and for a more clean look.

It was terribly confusing remembering how to do CAD modeling but it's coming back to me. I am making the files available here.

Instead of attaching to the fan, the duct will attach to the shroud, and the parts will sandwich the existing case metal (and cover the ugly cutout).

When the tray is removed, the duct will stay fixed in place.

I got the Ultimaker from 2017 out of storage and it still works!

Printing white ABS here.

Test fit of the duct was a snug fit, a bit difficult to get over the rubber pads on the L9 fan, but alignment and print scaling were good.

Brass inserts and screws test fitted and alignment was good.

Ran out of time to finish it today but will see if it works out tomorrow

 

[SFFMunkee]

Ok, after only two days it was getting hard to resist just cutting a hole in the side, so I just got it over with and got out the trusty jigsaw and did some damage.

Spoiler: "x300 Modification #1"

The plan was to design a duct and shroud to cover the rest of the side holes so there is no circular airflow, and for a more clean look.

It was terribly confusing remembering how to do CAD modeling but it's coming back to me.

Instead of attaching to the fan, the duct will attach to the shroud, and the parts will sandwich the existing case metal (and cover the ugly cutout).

When the tray is removed, the duct will stay fixed in place.

I got the Ultimaker from 2017 out of storage and it still works!

Printing white ABS here.

Test fit of the duct was a snug fit, a bit difficult to get over the rubber pads on the L9 fan, but alignment and print scaling were good.

Brass inserts and screws test fitted and alignment was good.

Ran out of time to finish it today but will see if it works out tomorrow

Really looking forward to the end result, loving watching this come together