Petezah

This evening I decided to try wiring up my computer case’s front headphone jack with the components I bought earlier. After attempting to tin the contacts on the box header, the thing essentially disintegrated, much to my chagrin. I guess I’m not too disappointed in a connector I spent all of $0.50 on.

So, on to Plan B then I guess. I finished tinning the ends of the wires I planned to use for the job, and after much irritation, managed to wire up one of the stereo plugs. At this point I decided to give up on the microphone jack for now, just so I can be done for the evening. Anyway, I had discovered earlier, to my delight, that the female header connectors (for the case) have large enough holes that I can just jam the other end of the tinned wires into them, eliminating, for now, my need for male header connectors. So I fired up the computer, turned on some MP3s and plugged my headphones into the front of the case so I could tell when I hit the right contacts.

Fortunately, I guessed correctly on the first try because the designers were sane enough to color code the stereo headphone wires red and blue for the positives and white for the ground. This picture above is the finished product. Huzzah, on to the next project.

I’d been wanting a new case for a while, but I just never got around to getting one. Anyway, this week I ordered one from newegg and got the computer all torn down and put back together on Wednesday. The nifty new case has front USB ports and headphone/microphone jacks; unfortunately neither my motherboard nor my USB card nor my soundcard had pin header outputs, so the front ports had to lay dormant temporarily.

Today, however, I went down to Fry’s and managed to find a USB 2 card with a 4-pin header on it. Appallingly, it appeared to be the only one that did have one. Pretty retarded, I think. I also picked up a 10-pin box header and a couple of 8th inch stereo connectors so I can connect up the soundcard’s outputs to the case’s front inputs. I’ll put up a picture of that when I get it built.