Trying to fit things into a computer case…
(Like, say, this one ) ... can sometimes be a pain. I'd put a CD drive into the case, so I could plug a CD of photos in and have it display photos without a network connection, but since I'd lifted the motherboard up on spacers to clear the infrared connector, it meant that I had to put the computer connection in the middle of the drive cable, like:
+-----------[=====cd drive=====]
|
|------ computer
|
+------------[hard drive]
Electrical engineers will immediately realize this was a horrible mistake (probably because of cable termination.) I, of course, am not an electrical engineer (the extent of my electrical engineering skills is being able to figure out what wattage a transformer can put on and, if I have a cheat sheet handy, being able to figure out what sort of register I need to attach a noise-emitting diode to a 12v power line) and thus did not realize this until after I'd glued up internal supports and assembled the whole box.
So what I needed to do (and did, last night, during the 30 minute case building window) was to rip the entire pile of guts out of the box, so I can (tonight) go back and redo the cabling like:
+---------[======cd drive=====] | |--[hard drive] | computer
Which, of course, means I have to dismantle the infrared connector and move the serial interface part of it up over the top of the system board. This should be a pretty trivial exercise. The only thing that's likely to drive me to screaming distraction is having to drill holes on the inside of a hickory-wood box so I can attach a shelf to put the hard and CD-ROM drives on.
It would be much easier to just put USB connections into the box and attach an external USB drive, but that would sort of defeat the whole idea of a nice pretty box to put into the living room.