Well, my hand is feeling quite a bit better at this point, and the work I was doing that caused the original injury is now complete! It doesn't look like much work now that it's all together below... but it took quite a few hours to get this all done and right.  First, to make sure there were no further injuries, I went out and bought the tool I should have been using all along... a drill press vise!  Now that acrylic bar isn't going ANYWHERE.  The drilling position for repeated presses is a bit more precise, too, which is always nice! The other real trick to getting clean holes this large without shattering the acrylic was to slow down how quickly I was pressing down on the bit substantially, especially as I was about to breach the other side of the bar. I was going about a millimeter every second or so before... I dialed that back to about a millimeter every 3-4 seconds... more of a 'shaving' action than a 'drilling' action at that rate... but it worked perfectly.I did a bit more planning on how I wanted to route and separate cables down under the radiators, then went to town drilling holes on my spacer bars. I ended up deciding on three paths due to the eventual number of cables I would be sending between cells... one for power, one for sensors, and one for data/uplink. I'll be powering and controlling 8 fans from this little area, along with the sensors for water temperature and such... so lots of wires coming and going. In addition, I needed a square hole that could fit a USB type B cable for powering and controlling the Arduino, so I got to work filing one of the holes into a square:  Perfect!   The cable will route through the end spacer of my radiator housing and directly into the Arduino, like so. The Arduino will be mounted to a thin sheet of acrylic... or perhaps in some kind of housing that will be attached via velcro to the underside of the housing... I haven't decided yet.  Here we are with most of the routing in place:  The center cell in the picture will be where a small 'power distribution' breakout board will be located. I'll have two standard 4-pin molex power lines from the PSU come down and power that board, which in turn will send power to all the fans and pumps and whatnot. That distribution board is still a work in progress... but should be together for next time! Cya then!  |