Power Supply LED Mod Guide

Former staff writer - August 18, 2002
Category: Modding
Price: $3.60

• 2 LEDs Color of your Choice.
  
• Wire (had around the house)
• Wire Cutters (ditto)
• Screw Driver (ditto)
• Soldering Iron & Solder (ditto)
• Electric Tape and Or Heat shrink Tubing (ditto)
• Your Brain

Total Cost of this project: 3 bucks n' 60 cents and about an hour of time.

Disclaimer

Before we start I must tell you all, this was a first PSU mod for me.. and It was all trial and error, I intended to add 3 LEDs but 3 was to many for the 5volts to power, so in the middle of my guide I had to cut 1 LEDs out that is why you see 3 LEDs in the picture..

Disclaimer: Neither myself or OverclockersClub.com will be held reasonable if you hurt yourself in anyway or you blow your house up, by following this guide. Playing inside of a PSU is very dangerous - Even if the PSU has been shut off for a while there is always a deadly electrical charge in the capacitors!

Modding

Now on with the good stuff! Alright To start off we need to take the victim apart..

Here I have a Generic PSU, any PSU will work! Take out the screws (4 in my case) to get the cover off the PSU.

Take a look around locate the purple wire (this wire is the Standby wire) The Standby wire supplies 5 volts at all
times. As soon as you plug in your computer, power is ran though that wire which is were we will be installing our
LED's.

Next get your wire out and we will be hooking the LEDs up.

Cut off 1 short wire and 2 longer wires. Make sure to give yourself enough room on the small wire to work with, other words don't make it too small. Now connect your first long piece of wire to the positive leg (or wire) of the LED (remember the positive leg is always the longer leg). I would suggest you shorten the legs of the LEDs so you don't have to wrap them all the way to the bottom. Now that its connected, solder the wires together (this will give you the best connection) If you don't like to solder make sure you connect them tight. Once you have done that, usse heat shrink tubing on it and melt it down. If you don't have any heat shrink tubing then use some electrical tape. Make sure you cover all of the wires because you don't want them to touch anything.

Now take a short wire and connect it to the negative LED leg, and solder or tape it together. Then finally take the last long piece of wire and connect it to the negative leg on the 2nd led. It will look something like this:

Now on to the fun part! Cut the purple wire on the power supply in half and then strip the wires back.

Now connect the positive side of the LEDs to the purple wire. Solder and tape as needed.

Now find your favorite black wire (Black is the ground wires) and cut one of those in half, and take the second long wire on the negative leg of the 2nd led and hook it on as you did with the positive one. Tape and solder as needed.

Now take your LEDs and tape them to where u want them to stay in the PSU. (Now I would suggest a glue gun to keep them there, but mine is broke at the moment so tape is what I am using).

And then it will look like this! (this was my first try with 3 LEDs It wasn't very bright) Now plug in the PSU power cord and they should light up:

If they do not light up, then you need to check the connections to the LEDs, and make sure they are all secure. Also make sure none of the wires are touching anything else but there own wires. If they are touching anything else it could ground them out, which will make it not light.

Well I hope you enjoyed this guide, I hope it helped and I hope you give it a try! Stay tuned for Part 2 of this mod where I will be making a window for the PSU to see the lights in the case :)