I finally started to make some progress on this upgrade. I have the frame pretty much built and I am just waiting for some more bits just to finish it off. Today I dissected the laptop down to the bare motherboard and completely dismantled the old controller box. It looks like everything is going to fit in to the top box nicely with plenty of room to spare.

Using a 25pin gender changer I should be able to connect the BOB directly to the laptop motherboard without the need for a cable. I have ordered the IDE to SATA connector, so I can use an old 64GB SATA SSD on the laptop motherboard and I have also cut down the laptop PSU lead and hard-wired it to the motherboard. That side of things I am pretty confident about and if I keep all the mains stuff over one side don't foresee any problems with the electronics.

So the only couple of things I need advice with now are the earthing and panel cut-outs.

I presume it would be sensible to make sure all of the aluminium panels are connected together and earthed. The slot reducing profile is plastic and insulates the panels from the profile frame, so I would need to do some manual connecting.

The panels are 3mm aluminium and I will obviously need cut-outs for the switches, connectors, LEDS etc. My machine, apart from being in bits, is not big enough to do the panels anyway as they are 117mm x 440mm. I know it's a difficult question to answer without more detail but any ideas what sort of cost to get these machined? What software to design the panels that makes it easy to convert to GCode?

Anyway, I'll maybe try and takes some pictures over the weekend if anyone is interested.

Regards,

Les