The Mini-Fanbus

The principle of connecting the connectors together is pretty much the same as with the original Fanbus guide. The only difference here is that you'll be doing this on a much smaller scale... on a PCB to be exact instead of the the Electronic Hobby Box as I've shown in the original guide. And as you can see, the PCB board itself is quite large for a mini fanbus, so you'll need to cut it up. For that, I used the Plastic Cutter. It's like a normal exacto knife but with a "hook" blade to cut or "score" a deep line on the material. I normally used this to cut plexi or acrylic but it works just fine with the PCB board. Use a ruler to guide the blade and cut the PCB board to a size that you desire. You don't have to cut thru the board, just score a few deep cuts and the PCB board will break away easily. Once you got the size you want, it's time to lay out the connectors on it.

Cutting the PCB up....

The Molex connector used in this mini fanbus is different from the ones in your case in that it is meant to be used on a PCB board. It has metal connectors on the back of it for you to solder it onto the board. The metal connectors were a little too big for the holes on the PCB but using a cutter, I trimmed them up and now it fits like a glove.

Metal connectors too wide....

Nothing a cutter can't fix! :O)

You will then need to line the Molex and the Terminal Blocks on the board, making sure there's enough room for you to solder on the jumper wires. The pictures below also shows you the routing of the wires from the Molex to the terminal blocks. The Terminal blocks are of the screw-on types. What you need to do is just insert the bare wires from your fans/lights into the hole and tighten the screw to secure the wire in. Take note, I said "bare wires"..... this means that you'll have to strip off the connector from your fans/lights. I've always preferred this method for my fans/lights. Saves me the headaches caused by all the different connectors that my fans comes with... :O)

View of board with connectors.

How it's wired up....

You should have your soldering iron ready by now. Secure the Molex and terminal blocks onto the PCB board by soldering their metal connectors down. You can either use wires or connecting metal pieces as shown below. I don't know what they're actually called but I found them at a local electronics store and they're perfect for the job.

Use wires... or these....

Solder 'em up!

Close up........

It shouldn't take long to have the joints soldered and you should have something like the pictures above. Some of the metal pins are longer than required so you can snip them off if you like. Once that's done, you can start connecting/soldering the connecting wires. Start with the 12V Line first. I used yellow wires to indicate the 12V line here. Take note of which section of the terminal block that you joint the wires to. Use the "Solder Blobs" method to joint the wires to the Molex and terminal block.

Connect the wires....

Use solder "blobs" to connect them to the Molex and Terminal block

Do the same for the Ground (Black) wires and once you're done, you should have something like the pictures below. Now you have your own Mini-Fanbus! You can see that the one I made is not much bigger than the PCMods.Com's version. Not as good looking but still functions the same.

DONE!

There you go! Your own Mini-Fanbus!!

Now it's time to strip the connectors off your fans and tidy things up a little in your case! :O) The Fanbus is still the way to go if you don't need any kind of control over your fan speed but still want to keep things tidy and have a centralized location to connect all your fans to. But what if you DO have a control device and still want some way to easily connect your fans to the device? That's where the Control Device Power Extender is about.... :O)

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