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Still Getting It Ready
My little hacked power switch
The G4 chassis uses a single 20-pin cable to drive the power and reset switches, as well as the LEDs. I haven't managed to figure out the LED system yet, and I don't want to blow them out by supplying too much voltage to them. Still, I did find some schematics showing the positions of the switch pins. I went ahead and used an SPDIF cable to manually trigger the power switch by cutting off the lead ends of the wires and inserting them into pins 5 and 6 of the 20-pin cable. Success! The motherboard boots! This, of course, is a poor long-term solution. I needed some more parts, so I went to my local electronics store. The end result of a few hours of soldering...
The new and improved little hacked power switch
I bought a couple of 20-pin IDC headers and soldered them to a small board with wires linking the relative pins together. With this and a few 2-pin SPDIF cables in tow, I just hooked up the wires to the switch headers. A bit messy, but it's a flexible solution, in the likely case I change motherboards. This particular AOpen board doesn't use normal-sized LED headers, so I'd have to hack something special for those. The IDE light is a four-pin connector, and the power LED is three pins. As an added plus, the 20-pin G4 cable seems to use logic controls to run the 2-color power button LED.
I used another SPDIF cable to bridge the internal fan connection to a motherboard power header, and hacked another cable to link the routed CD-audio cable to the sound card. There's another connection coming out of the front panel that I don't really know anything about. It looks like a 3-pin power cable for a fan, but there's no fan in the place where this supply goes. If anyone out there can give me more information about this, I'd really appreciate it.
>> Conclusion & Future Looks
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