Install cold cathodes in your XBOX 360
From Wiki-Scene
Contents |
introduction
Cold cathodes are a cheap and easy solution to lighting up the inside of your xbox 360 console. For those inexperienced with electronics but have a basic grasp of soldering this tutorial will allow you to install a cold cathode setup into your xbox 360.
Required Supplies
- Dual 4" Cold cathode kit, with included inverter
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- Wire strippers/Plyers/Scissors anything to cut/strip back wires
- screwdriver/knife (for scraping old solder)
Installation
Step 1 : Peparing the kit for use
Once you get your kit and open it up you will have something similar to this, yours may come supplied with a switch and/or a sound controller device
Remove the 4 pin molex power plug
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode1.jpg
from where you cut the molex adaptor off, strip the wires back a little, say 5mm or so, whatever your comfortable with. For reference, black is almost always ground, so whatever colour wires your kit comes with the black one will be ground and the coloured one will be 12v.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode2.jpg
Get your soldering iron out and drop a little solder onto the end of each of the wires, this will make connectiong later on alot easier.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode3.jpg
Step 2 : Opening the 360 and identifying the points
Get your 360 and dismantle it.
Hopefully youve managed to dissasemble your xbox, get your motherboard and flip it over and look for the area where the powerplug goes into, it looks like this.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode4.jpg
Step 3 : Soldering your wires
Using the pic below identify the 12v and ground points. Soldering to these points is hard with a low powered iron so a good method of doing so is to lightly scratch at an area of the solder so its clean and shiny and then drop some solder onto it, like ive done in the picture below..
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode5.jpg
grab your wires and solder the black to the Gnd and the yellow (or whatever colour it is) to the 12v, this should be easy peasy since both parts have solder on them. Once done, put a little bit of electrical tape over it to stop any short that might occur.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode6.jpg
once youve done that, flip the motherboard over and put it back in the case. It should look a little like this.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode7.jpg
now im not going to go into any great detail as to where to mount the cathodes/switch/sound controller/inverter because it's completely up to you, the user, and every kit is different. Below are some pics of my setup, this works well for me, but it's completly up to you.
Anyway once youve done that, plug her in and fire it up, if all is good it should look a little something like this.
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode8.jpg
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode9.jpg
http://www.apcd53.dsl.pipex.com/xboxscene/cathode/cathode10.jpg
--grim_d 15:55, 31 Jul 2006 (EDT)
