Ben999_'s XBOX Case Modz

My Xbox has quite a few case mods at the moment. I have a flashed TSOP with a custom bios and retail bios on a switch, a lighted custom engraved jewel, a blue Xbox logo on the controller, a white painted top and eject panel and enclosure, a modified Samsung 616T drive made to work and fit like an Xbox DVD drive, a 120 GB replacement hard drive, an external enclosure housing a 160 GB hard drive enabled with a switch, a white hard drive activity LED, side intake fans, controller indicator lights (light when plugged in), lighted buttons on the controller, lighted USB adapter, and a Blue 80mm LED fan replacing the stock exhaust fan.

In case you missed the link on the front page, the tutorial I made for adding Jewel LED's is right HERE.

Here shows the replaced eject LED's. They are two 5mm blue LED's. You can also see the lighted jewel on top. No controllers are plugged in the Xbox in this pic.

I think it looks great. The white hard drive LED is on in this pic.

A front view showing the painted eject panel, top, and enclosure. Notice the LED's above the controller ports. They turn on when a controller is plugged in.

Overall pic of the box.

Here you can see the side intake fan.

Close up. The enclosure is actually an SCSI enclosure but I took out the Connections and just used the power supply for my liking. I made a little custom logo and painted a drive bay cover along with the enclosure.

Another pic in the dark.

This time the controller makes an entrance.

Here's the lighted jewel with 8 blue LED's.

Here is the wiring for the jewel LED's. Right after the red wire exits this pic, it is hooked up to a resistor and then to 5 volts from the power supply. The black wire is grounded.

I bet you never even noticed the replaced DVD drive. I mounted it perfectly stealth.

Here's how I wired the Molex plug to the proprietary yellow cable the Xbox uses.

Here's the rear of the case. The red and yellow switches above the video A/V plug are to disable power to the hard drive inside the Xbox, when the hard drive in the enclosure is powered. As long as only one of them is powered at any one time, they will work independently. That switch above the Ethernet port is the BIOS selection. I don't have a chip anymore but I flashed the onboard chip (TSOP) and installed the switch so it works as a normal Xbox or a modified one.

Another shot from the back. Disregard those DVD stickers, they're from what my original mod involving the enclosure was for. I used it to house a PC DVD drive that could be switched on in order to read CD-R's. The Samsung 616T mod changed all that.

Here's the inside of that enclosure under the Xbox. I have to open it upside-down because it is actually flipped in the position I have it. The reason I had to do this, is because the IDE cable would not properly enter the enclosure otherwise, it would have to come out in front of the exhaust fan, which is no good. Anyway, to your right you see the power supply for this thing, exhaust fan in the middle, audio connectors that I don't use, some weird plug thing (has a bunch of wires connected to it and displays different numbers when you press the little button on the outside, if you know what it is or have any idea, let me know), and then there's the hard drive of course.

And another shot within the enclosure. Notice my intuitive (a.k.a. "quite ghetto") hard drive mounting system. I bent the hell out of a brass mounting bracket used to put a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay. Then I bolted it to the case and voila!

In this pic you can see just how little room I have left in there. Makes it tough for new mods, but it's worth the effort.

If you do the DVD mod, you will have to cut a slot similar to the one I have made here. Otherwise the lid won't close correctly and it will compress on the cables. I believe I used a wire snippers to cut the metal and plastic.

Here's the inside showing how I mounted the fans. Thanks to MartialXboxArtist of Xbox-Scene.com for this spiffy idea.

Another pic of the fans from a different angle. You can see I used Shoe Goo® to keep them in place, because it looks like hot melt glue and smells like hot melt glue ('cept for the yummy fumes) but it dries much harder and stronger.

Yeah I know, there are only 2 there. But the 3rd one would have cost an extra $9 and I didn't think It was necessary.

Here's a mod that more and more people are doing over at Xbox-Scene. I replaced the stock fan with a quieter, more powerful, and BLUE LED 80mm case fan. I rounded off the bottom of an 80mm fan and broke off the clips on the bottom of the Xbox so the fan would fit it. Also I had to dremel off part of the Xbox and DVD plastic holder thingies (yes that's the technical term). The blue wire taped to the side of the fan is the RPM monitor wire, but obviously the Xbox can't make any use of it so I snipped it..

This is my first fan replacement, it's basically installed the same way that my LED fan is put in.

Here's what the fan looks like from the outside. Glowing and blowing better than ever.

Here is my USB adapter for use in Linux. It works perfectly but most importantly it looks nice. I completely surrounded a Blue LED in hot glue. Diffuses almost every bit of the light quite nicely.

This bright, even with the flash on. All in a tidy enclosure that I ripped off of an inverter for a neon light I broke a while back.

The bottom shows the guts of it more than the top does.

And here's what the USB port itself looks like. There are small gaps around it, but not noticeable.

Here it is, my controller. Those are lighted buttons you see there. I mounted LED's inside them. A lot of work, and a nice effect.

Here's another pic from a little further away.

This pic shows how much they glow. I tilted the controller towards a piece of paper.

Here is a pic with the controller unplugged. You can't really tell that they have been modified until it is plugged in.

Here is how I wired this bad boy. For some reason the B button wouldn't light up with the others when hooked up in series. I think it was the length of the wire but I'm not sure, so I gave it it's own resistor. The hardest part of this mod is making sure that the buttons have just enough hot glue inside them to perform as well as the original buttons. I think I did it quite well, since they seem very similar. Also, I used a red LED for the B button, a white LED for the A and Y buttons, ,and a blue LED for the X button.

Here is what the buttons should look like after you drill them out. You have to be careful not to go too far. I caught the edge of the B and it chipped a very tiny bit on the top left corner of it.

This pic came out a little blurry, but it is the X button with the LED placed inside and filled with hot glue. You don't want to fill up the entire thing, but just enough to make it flush with the bottom of the little rim that goes around the edge.

What you see here is the inside of a controller plug. I took it apart and soldered a Blue LED with a 100ohm resistor to the 5v and Ground connections of the USB pins.

This is what the plugs look like then. They glow through the translucent casing. It's a little harder to see because of my controller port LED's, it almost looks like a reflection but they do glow.

The front glows much more.

Here's my airflo controller before modification, it has a fan in the back that blows air on your hands.

The wiring ended up looking a little different in the end, but you get the idea. Under that spongy gray stuff I found the memory card pins and I eventually used those.

This is what it looks like without the fan on, when it is on it spreads the light across the moving fan blades. The Blue LED's also shine out all of the little air holes, which creates a great effect.

And finally, here is my controller logo. I changed it to a blue one I whipped up in Photoshop. Matches my custom BIOS nicely.