I noticed a few people over the last few days asking how to put cold cathodes into their 360, and there isnt a tutorial in the faq so i thought since i wanted to rewire mine i might aswell make a tutorial out of it, so here goes.
Ok so youve probably got a nice spangly new kit that looks something like this, my cathodes have already been modified to fit into my case and your kit may have either a sound controller or a switch on it. Either way, the cable with the molex pass thru on it is the one we will be using.
Oh yeah, and if you can't solder this tutorial is no use to you.
Anyway, see that molex pass through connector? chop that bad boy off, it aint needed.
from where you cut the molex adaptor off, strip the wires back a little, say 5mm or so, whatever your comfortable with. For reference, black is almost always ground, so whatever colour wires your kit comes with the black one will be ground and the coloured one will be 12v.
crack the soldering iron out and drop a little solder onto the end of each of the wires, this will make connectiong later on alot easier.
Grab your 360 and dismantle it, if you don't know how to do that then go
here if you dont like that tutorial then visit the faq and there are a few more.
Pressing on...ok so hopefully youve managed to dissasemble your xbox, get your motherboard and flip it over and look for the area where the powerplug goes into, it looks like this.
Using the pic below identify the 12v and ground points. Soldering to these points is hard with a low powered iron so a good method of doing so is to lightly scratch at an area of the solder so its clean and shiny and then drop some solder onto it, like ive done in the picture below..
grab your wires and solder the black to the Gnd and the yellow (or whatever colour it is) to the 12v, this should be easy peasy since both parts have solder on them. Once done, put a little bit of electrical tape over it to stop any short that might occur.
once youve done that, flip the motherboard over and put it back in the case. It should look a little like this.
now im not going to go into any great detail as to where to mount the cathodes/switch/sound controller/inverter because it's completely up to you, the user, and every kit is different. Below are some pics of my setup, this works well for me, but it's completly up to you.
Anyway once youve done that, plug her in and fire it up, if all is good it should look a little something like this.
Hope this helps some people in need. Good Luck
-Grim
This post has been edited by grim_d: Jul 11 2006, 01:30 PM
Tutorial : Cathode Installation
Jul 11 2006, 01:24 PM
I know. I've had a "red" light wired IDE cable before...boooo. It was pink! I'm going to my electronics supply store to pick up some LED kits, and some eSATA parts. I've got something up my sleeve for Vader 
