The amazing UFO lamp used for something it wasn't made for!
Welcome to the Fiber-o-rama MoBo page. This page details how you can spend many hours weaving fiber strands into the via holes on your motherboard. Put a color shifting light and presto change-o, you have a new amazing light show hidden away inside your PC that will make you the talk of the town and women will swoon at your feet. It gives the appearance of the computer data moving along communication paths in your PC. Its the visualization of data movement.
The UFO lamp
The amazing UFO lamp used for something it wasn't made for!
So you start with an el-cheapo UFO lamp that Walmart sells for $8 which is really a great deal as all the others that I've seen cost in the $25 to $30 range. You buy two: one to make the Fiber-o-rama motherboard and the other just to play with cause secretly its just plain cool. By the way, the fibers are not really fiber optics but fishing line that transmits light.
This shows what it looks like when its on and you have an matching el-cheapo digital camera to take pictures with!
The Motherboard
Find a motherboard that doesn't have the via holes soldered. A via hole is a hole drilled into the board to join traces on the opposite side of the printed circuit board. The holes are plated with copper or some other conductive material.
If you look closely, you can see ambient light shining through the via holes that will soon be filled with fber strands.
Hold the motherboard up to a light like a window and you should see about 500 small holes drilled through the board. This is the board you want. Sometimes during the soldering stage the holes get filled with solder and are useless for us. Throw those motherboards away! (or email them to me...
Weaving the light fantastic
Next prop the motherboard up against a monitor so that there is light shining from the back like from the window that we talked about before. Place one strand of light into each of the via holes. This should take you about 7 hours or so.. After you've done a bunch of fibers, glue them in place with a hot glue gun.
The Hot Glue Gun
I used the hot glue gun from hell! It was about the size of a 45 caliber pistol and was way too hot for the fishing line. The glue would melt the line enough that it would bend but still work. I suggest the lower temperature glue sticks and a cheap $5 hot glue gun. It would be smaller and easier to work with. Expect that the glue will not stick very well to the motherboard, some strands will unglue but hey what's 5 or 10 strands out of 500? Pretty good failure rate as far as I'm concerned and nobody is going to notice anyways . So much for quality assuarance.
The Umbilical Cord
The fiber strands are bunched together into an umbilical cord which is plugged into the UFO lamp base. I'm just fitting the complete base against the backside as the whole unit is being put in a display case at the local Tech Institute. You may want to take the UFO base apart cause its quite large and just take out the lamp and color wheel portion. You can see the umbilical cord on one of the pictures on the right. I only used about 1/2 of the available strands, the rest are just hanging on the back.
Here's about 500 strands of fiber weaved into the motherboard with the backing plate on. Unused strands are bunched together and pointing to the right.
The strands of fiber are plastic fishing line and the glue is melted plastic both are non conductive. As long as you don't zap the board with static electricity, you're safe. You add as many strands as you like without affecting the board.
Case considerations
I found that the majority of strands (about 1/2) ended up right behind the floppy and hard-drives and were not viewable - bummer. So I've modified the case and moved the drives into the 5 1/2" bays. A plexiglass side allows all those to wonder at the majesty of the Fiber-o-rama motherboard.
For better viewing, I shortened the hard-drive and floppy drive ribbon cables and tucked them out of the way..
Here's a pix with just a few of the 500 lights on. The colors are constantly shifting and look a lot better than the pix.
It's very difficult to take a good picture of lights that are constantly shifting in color.
I'm disappointed with the quality of the images. It is very difficult to take a picture of the constantly changing lights. A movie camera would work much better as I could utilize the zoom to take closeups. Oh well , you get the general drift.