Toolmans faux iMac 

Update: Had to recompress the graphics due to the huge amount of viewing via, Digg, Engadget, Make. Thanks for looking! - mechanicalmarksy

What do you do with a gutted Apple Studio display CRT with no electronics in it?
If you ask my pal Sam from Silverstripe, he'd tell you  "Pretend you were darth vader.."
Hed also tell me that table based pages are old skool and awful, and I'd agree - my excuse is that this page was generated by a konqueror thumbnail plugin and then edited with NVu.  Think of this as the frontpage of design techniques.  Meh anyway, deal with my table :P   So how did this all start? Well I got given a mini ITX from my pal Atech from Bassdrop and I had been looking for a project to put it in - I have looked over the usual mini ITX sites and most of the ideas I considered have already been done - gas cans, C64s, Amigas, toasters... Eventually I decided to build a fake iMac, having made a PC based G3/C3 BnW previously.  I bought a gutted iMac slot load - a blue and white one in the same shade as my G3/C3 BnW.  Unfortunately this case was going to be a mish to fit a 17" LCD in, due to the curve of the CRT bezel and the general lack of space in the case.  So you might imagine how happy I was when I found a gutted Apple studio display CRT for sale on Trademe. With the switch came a 17" CRT that was a trinitron flat screen - meaning the bezel was flat!  Also, the case was very pretty in clear and smoke grey acrylic. So... how to fit everything in nicely? The first thing to do was mount the LCD.  The frame had 4 large bolt threads - one in each corner, and so I made arms from old case slot covers.  Using plastic spacers, a marker pen and some eye-ometry, I managed to get the LCD to sit at the right offset out in pixel-perfect alignment to the bezel - the LCD is larger then the CRT bezel hole due to the differeces in 17" measurement.  Thats right kids, 17" CRTs have about 16.1" *viewable* area, whereas LCDs go right to the 17.0th inch :)
LCD mount adaptor 1	LCD mount adaptor 2	LCD mount adaptor 3
LCD and bezel 1	LCD and bezel 2	LCD and bezel with front
I had to seriously modify the front button PCBs.  The original item was i2c, and as I know nothing about i2c, I decided butcher wires straight off the microswich, sand back the PCB, drill new holes and mount 2x LEDs for the PC.  There are 2 buttons, and so one is used for the on/off switch of the screen, the other for the motherboard on/off.  if you look at the close pic, you can see my buthery.  I know that this wasn't pretty and i possibly could have sused out i2c, but meh, stick with what you know.  There was very little space on the unseen side of the PCBs - I ended up having to grind and file the 5mm LEDs down to get them to fit (some people are so ghetto!).  I needed 5mm because I couldn't find 3mm ones bright enough.  the buttons are semi-oaque and the brightest 3mm ones I could find didnt cut it.
Front buttons close	Front buttons	frontage
I decided to add a mic for voIP goodness.  I drilled a sneaky hold in the center at the top of hte bezel - right in the black line.  It is hard to see without being pointed out :)  The mic is sitting in bluetack (yeah again, ghetto) but its not going anywhere and Mcguyver would be proud.
Mic mount 1	Mic mount 2
The LCD panel had its power supply and logic boards strapped to its back, but there was a second board that sat at the front of the original LCD case which had 2 functions: audio amp for the laughable 1 inch speakers in the screen, and 7 buttons for on/off, menu, auto, UDLR.   Oh and a 2 state LED that wasnt bright enough to use behind the apple buttons. This PCB was mounted to the shielding of the LCD PSU. I converted the buttons and LEDs to connectors and disabled the amp.  I then mounted 6+1 buttons (sneaky red reset button on other side - can be seen in "LCD buttons 1")  on the bottom part of the monitor/case stand.  The 7th PCB button is on/off and is on the front of course.. This PCB actually only needed 3 wires for the 6 buttons, each button having a different resistor value on it.  I wired it this way to save wiring (6x2 vs 3).  That is why the buttons have longer-then-youd-expect shrink wrap on them
LCD PCB mount 1	LCD PCB mount 2	LCD back
LCD Buttons 1	LCD Buttons 2
The picture in black is the shielding that stis in the bottom of the case - it was originally pearl white, but it was scratched by the person I bought the case off, presumably taking the CRT guts out was a bit of a wrestle!  I had to cut all the holes anyway so it needed to be sanded, primed and repainted anyway.  I did the PSU mounts at the same time as shown further down. The dotted D grill on the black piece is the only piece of the case that isnt covered in acrylic, except of course for the screen.  I was not keen to cut acrylic if I could avoid it, because a crack would be disasterous, so I squeezed everything to this hole.  The power connector is in the standard place for this screen, but everything else there is added by me.  It has a power switch, ethernet cable extender (with patch cable to go to motherboard), the front panel PCB from some old case with firewire, usb and mic/headphones, and above are holes where coax for the TV tuner and composite/svideo out from the motherboard will be added. Although this was only a CRT, it actually had a hold for side USB ports!  This is because  Apple made their own standard for video connectors  known as ADC.  It was basically a DVI connector with the addition of upstream USB connectivity and I think power button communication also - maybe the i2c bus that I butchered? I had to make a special adapter bracket for the USB port as the case came without the guts (including the USB ports themselves), so I used a front case PCB, ground corners off it to make it fit, and cut a type A - type A USB cable in half and soldered both connectors on.  (A guy at work gave me the Type A - Type A: what the hell would you use that for ?)  The wires were slightly thick for the PCB holes and took ages to get in, the capacitor had to be reloaced to the back, and the bracket was also made with eye-ometry: suffice to say that port took ages to get aligned and working right..
connectors	connectors top	USB sideport 1
These pictures show hoe hte motherboard was mounted.  I used the floor pan of the sacrificial case that also donated the front panel connectors and cut to down to motherboard size, and used (more) slot covers to mount the floor to the D ring of metal above the black grille/panel.  Zip ties to keep everthing tidy..
motherboard mounts 2	PCI mount technique	motherboard mounts
Motherboard mount	base with components mounted
The PSU was mounted at the back, without its shell.  Im not 100% if shielding on a PSU does much, but havent had any probs.  FCC would probably frown.. The PSU PCB actually used the case to share the earth to parts of the board, so the green leads on the back wires each corner to earth.  The bracket was made from the case, modified to mount to studs on the D ring.  They were in a flat triangle, and mount it solidy.  I wasn't sure if I could get away with convection, and so I decided to cool it with a clear sleeve and a fan a the top.  The sleeve is actually a 3 litre juice bottle: I mounted my dummy 80mm fan ("PSU with duct 2")  and drilled/dremmeled out the hole on the bottom.  I then used a heat gun to carefully shrink and conform the plastic to the right shape.  That was my second try.. The final shot shows the real fan and grill.  The grill hides the edges of the plastic and makes it look more professional (and therefore less like a recycling bin).
PSU 1	PSU 2	PSU with duct 1
PSU with duct 2	PSU with duct 3
The last piece needed is a hard drive.  I had made the mount holes earlier while doing the LCD mount.  Drilling is best done well away from he motherboard and other electronics - the first pic below is me lining up the position with an old dummy 3.5" HDD, the second shot shows the final drive. The top mount is a 5.25"->3.5" adapter bracket, the bottom a simple metal strap.
HDD mount location	HDD final mount	guts
With all the hardware in place, it was time to power up and test the unit!  It powered up fine first time (yay!) but memtest found errors straight away (arg!).  I got a different stick of ram and tried that... same problem, same memory address.. This is odd I think.. I try a few more sticks, all the same!  I finally chalked it up to the motherboard having a fault with its addressing at that location.  I toyed with the idea of using badmem/badram to make linux dodge the bad spots of memory, but the motherboard wouldnt boot anything much as the bad spots were very low, in the first 5Mb, making it impossble to compile a kernel on it- i'd need to cross compile it, tranfer it to both the install kernel and the actual kernel of ubuntu (there is probably some marginally easier way that some nerdy beardy linux bod could suggest).  On top of that, the kernel needs enough space to load before it can start dodging memory blocks, so getting a kernel to below 5Mb or whatever was potentially tricksy. So fuck it, I decided to just buy an identical new item.  Yes it was kinda the reason I made the project i the first place, but it was looking like a sweet project, and my lady needed a computer.   If anyone wants a kinda functional mini ITX, let me know :)
memtest bad RAM
Having procured and installed an identical new item, the Ubuntu install went smoothly.   As I was too scared to cut the acrylic I didn't get an optical drive in the unit, so I needed to 'bootstrap' the install before closing the case .  I really wished I could have mounted one, but I couldn't find an elegant location.  the only possible candidate was a slotload coming out the grill on the top.  The option is still there to add it in sometime.  I have left the secondard IDE (rounded) cable and power conector available for ease of CDROM if I ever have to.  I can simply mount a CDROM over the etherent, or boot off USB stick, so I doubt I will need to. I bought an Apple keyboard off Trademe also, and spent a morning disassembling it, cleaning every key individually and all the clear case, then reassembled it!
external CDROM	Ubuntu install	Final assembly
Ubuntu boot 2	Sam gives the hardware mod a fonzie style "Aaaaaaeeeeh!"	Ubuntu boot 1
Once I had an install, I had to construct a special modeline to compensate for the bezel.  I considered cutting the bezel but in the end loosing some pixles was more palateable.  The final screen resolution is less then 1280x1024, is something like 1060x960. The text virtual consoles to roll under the edge, but the unit is designed to use X11 so its no biggie. I After this was working,  I installed a OSX-ish theme and made the desktop, icons etc to look mac-ish.  Haven't bothered with any of the animation effects yet, keeping it simple and fast :)  Case: 17" Apple Studio Display monitor Motherboard: VIA EPIA-M10000 RAM: 512Mb generic HDD:  160Gb PATA TV: BT8x8 PAL OS: Ubuntu (Dapper) thetoolman AT gmail DOT com
Hardware showoff	These are some videos I made for my pal Marksy who is a Mac fiend and wishes he had a sweet mac like this one.  Its just me ranting while I film the hardware...	Software showoff