Peli-Rift Case

I have a business idea involving the Oculus Rift that I don’t want to go into here for obvious reasons but it requires me to have a portable, high powered pc-rig using the Oculus Rift VR viewer.

A few people on Reddit asked me to put together a ‘making of’ the peli-box. unfortunately I did not get as many images as I really should have when I put it together but here is a quick guide as to the basics of how I went about constructing it for anyone interested….

The Case

Confession: My Peli-Rift is not actually built in a Peli-Case!

I started with a much cheaper, but equally durable Peli-case knock off, bought from Maplin stores in the UK – dimensions are: internal 485 x 355 x 186, external 515 x 415 x 200

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/large-high-impact-case-with-pre-cut-foam-interior-n14gr

Using a mount cut from an old tower-pc I bolted the PSU to the base of the Peli-Case. You cant see in this image but I cut a rectangular slot in tue back of the case where the power cable plugs into the PSU. I also drilled around 30 holes directly under the fan of the PSU to allow air circulation.

I recommend getting all your PC components together first and lay them out in there to find a good arrangement – Keep cooling and airflow in mind.

I drilled holes in the base of the case at ‘tapping size’ then screwed in the brass motherboard spacers seen above – supplied with most motherboards. The case material is pretty good at threading itself as you screw in the spacers so no need for tapping them.

Mounted the motherboard on the spacers and screwed it down.

Next, Using an old laptop display from a broken [SONY] laptop I found the LCD screens serial number then purchased an LCD controller board on Ebay, You need to find the right controller to match your screen specs, the seller can help here if you give them a serial number. I chose one with HDMI out although there are also slightly cheaper DVI and MONITOR port versions to be found.

I then took the screen apart and ‘broke out’ the relevent connections onto the back of the monitor. You can not really see on the image but the controller board and other components are bolted to the back plate of the screen. The screen was also then attached to a water-cut piece of perspex with extra holes to allow me to bolt it to the peli-case lid. Note that the controller needs a 12v power supply.

Holes were drilled in the laptop lid to pull the cables out to the back.

The screen mounted in the lid, there is also a foam backing/surround for shock absorption.

The Perspex was also cut to accommodate the switch plate (top left) from the controller board allowing you to control the LCD as you would any standalone LCD monitor.

The controller board requires 12V power. Using a multimeter and a wiring diagram I located the 12v output on the PSU and soldered an extended cable with a DC socket on the end, feeding this through to the LCD controller board.

WARNING – Do not make any alterations to the PSU without making sure it is unplugged and discharged – They can be fatal if you do not know what you are doing!

I installed the GTX 980, before doing so I bent the case clips 90 degrees and bolted them through to the base of the case for extra stability.

Admittedly bending the clips on a £400 graphics card made me cringe a little but it was worth it to make sure everything is securely held in place.

All the components packed into the box and secured with cable-ties.

The drives (SSD) are attached to the case base using standard drive enclosures taken from an old PC tower. I also added sponge around the drives for a bit of shock absorption. Note the change of PSU due to me upgrading the graphics card to a GTX 980.

I plotted out the lid components in a CAD program and had the perspex water-cut in black 8mm Perspex, the lid shown here differed slightly from the final design.

I took a [RESET] and [PWR] button from an old PC tower, snipped the switches off them and soldered on some nicer chrome switches, screwing them onto the water-cut perspex lid.

A bit of creative cabling was required to keep everything away from the hot components, a lot of cable ties were used here. The HDMI lead was broken out of the graphics card using a HDMI port extender and passed through the perspex lid for the Oculus.

The cooling fan, temperature sensor/HD status light and USB sockets were also screwed to the Perspex lid, again taken from an old PC tower.

installed Windows using a USB stick, Oculus software, UE4 etc and Voila!….



Specs and additional components:

AMD FX 6300 – SKT AM3 3.5Ghz CPU

GeForce GTX 980 4096MB

GIGABYTE AM3GA-990FXA ATX motherboard

CORSAIR CX750 PSU

2 X CORSAIR 8GB RAM

120GB SSD

2 x 120GB 7200RPM Drive

Bluetooth Wireless Dongle for the keyboard and mouse

Xbox360 Controller Dongle

USB, ESATA USB 3.0 Sockets

Wireless Dongle

Windows 7