DIY Mini Atem Case Kit!

hey guys Caleb here with camera Foundry welcome to this overview video for the A10 mini DIY case kit in short we built and sold 20 custom limited run A10 Mini cases uh those are still out in the field doing their thing but we've had to discontinue future production just because of time resources finding the PCB boards to make it all work that said we had a lot of extra parts so I'm actually putting together some DIY kits so you can build something like this a DIY case for your A10 mini and everything you see here is included with exception to the Pelican case itself your A10 mini but this insert here I have another one in white will come with a case it also comes with a bunch of different Power connectors and cables and we're going to go through all of that in this video and talk about everything you need to build your own A10 Mini case so again this is for the base that goes in the bottom of the case you'll need a monitor if you want one at all and the Pelican 1170 case so without further Ado Let's do an overview of this kit what it comes with how it works and how you can install your A10 mini okay so here is the base and how it will ship it'll come with some other goodies we'll show you in a second but this is how it comes kind of pre-installed you can either just remove these two clamps throw your atem in put it in the case and you're done or open this thing up and do all kinds of wild stuff using the connectors that we're going to ship with it and this thing is designed to work with the Pelican 1170 case so here's an unmodified one you will need to make a cut out in the back of the case we'll talk about that in a second to get this guy installed so now let's talk about what comes with this kit and then we'll get into all of the Nitty Gritty when it comes to installing your A10 Mini case so here we have the base itself as you can see it's going to ship fully assembled with exception to a couple things that you can add yourself if I flip it over you can see that this thing will drop into the bottom of an 1170 case we also are including mounting points you could just slip this in there and it's a pretty tight fit and add a little bit of glue or you can go ahead and drill holes in the bottom of the case and bolt it up along all the sides of the case you'll see these little grooves which are designed to perfectly slide in to the track guides built into the case so it is a really custom fit really proud of how well that turned out on the top here you'll notice we have the clamps here on the left and right that hold your A10 mini in place we'll take a look at that here in a second we also have the face plates which wrap around in kind of an L shape and there is two vents here an intake and an outtake or blower fan and there are fans in here so this will ship with two fans pre-installed there's also a power switch in the middle which can be wired up to pretty much anything you'd like and there's routing for cables throughout the whole case we're going to look at all of that here in a second but first I want to talk about what else comes with this kit so here's the main you know star of the show the actual base I'll set that aside and we'll talk about some of the wiring harnesses that come with it so the first is going to be a simple xt30 connector this connects to the power switch so there's actually a little connector down in there so this can plug in there and then you can wire up anything to this power switch there's also a DC angled pigtail cable and this can be used to power your atem so it'll actually plug right in there loop around and down and into the case and there's actually a cut out right here for this cable and then you can wire it up to the switch or anything else we'll be including two of these DC female connectors and these can actually slide in both here and here on the case for a power in and power out or however you want to wire them up similarly I have a 3.5 millimeter or 8 inch audio jack TRS and we have all the wires nicely stripped here so you can solder that to a monitor so if you're running HDMI to an external Monitor and you want to run the headphone jack from that monitor down through the back of the case this will actually slip in right here in a custom spot for that connector and then you can use headphones with your case we'll also be including a 3.5 millimeter cable that is stripped and ready for soldering as well as an unmodified 3.5 millimeter cable so you can do whatever with these two if you want to at all and you'll notice also on these cutouts here we have spots for HDMI cables and just extra room to do whatever you want here already installed we have a female to female HDMI coupler right here if my camera decides to focus and this thing goes inside of the case and you can run HDMI cables through and back out or to a monitor whatever you want to do through the cutouts and that brings me to dismantling this thing so we can see what's inside how it works how you can route cables and what else you can do with this guy I'm going to start by removing these four screws that hold the clamps for the A-10 mini I would recommend using hand tools for this so you don't crack anything this is a very durable plastic it's petg but it is you know still plastic so we don't want to crack things and then you will need a couple Allen keys to get this thing dismantled so I've got those removed I'll set them right there and there we'll take our A10 Mini case and you could at this point just slot it right in take your clamps reinstall them and you're Off to the Races once you've modded your case boom everything's nice and snugly fit in there but we're going to carry on with the dismantling of this guy to see what's inside so if you want to remove the atem you take those clamps off they are key so if I flip one over you'll see there's a kind of a keyed shape there so they really lock in nicely here and they're not going to slide all over the place to remove the atem you can stick your thumb in the little thumb groove back here and remove it just like that now we're going to go ahead and remove the base down here at the bottom set that aside now you can see down into the bottom of the base so there's lots of room down here for running cables HDMI cables if you wanted to use that coupler and then we also have these two cables for the fans so there are two fans installed one is an intake which is right here it's going to suck air in pull it around the inside of a little tunnel here and there's an opening that lines up perfectly with the intake of the A10 mini so there it is right there then it's going to go through the A10 mini because there's a fan inside of this guy he's pulling all that air across and he's going to spit it out on this side that is going to be pulled by a fan that's right here through another Gap right there and there's another kind of piping that runs through the side of the case and then pulls or pushes air out here so you've got two fans honestly this is overkill but it's darn cool so if you want to use both you can if you just want to use one I would recommend pulling air through the exhaust and just not using the second one but we're including both some of these cases will also come with a air filter you'll see that a little bit some will not unfortunately we don't have enough and the last thing is you can customize the length of these cables you can just fold them up or cut them there are resistors built in so that the fans are a little more quiet but you can change the speed if you want at this point I'm also going to throw in our connectors since we have access to those connectors so I'm going to grab my audio 3.5 millimeter I'm going to loosen that just a little bit the little nut on here and I can simply press that down right there into that slot I'll lift it up so you can see a little better there it is nice and tightly snugged in there pretty slick next we'll install our power connectors for this loosen the nuts until they're just about to fall off and then these perfectly slide right in there then I can tighten up the nut and the same thing on the other side I'll just drop it in there and tighten up the nut so now we have our connectors in place you could also take this angled DC connector and he has a nice little spot right there in this cut out there's also excuse me as I drop that a cut out here and here you could put a little red USB 2.2 amp little board in there if you wanted a USB type a connector on the back there's also a spot here that works really well with an HDMI ribbon cable which can work with the HDMI output on this connector here if you want to see kind of how you could go about that you can watch both my original A10 Mini case as well as the overview for the case that we sold we sold 20 of them and you'll see how that worked but you can do that or not whatever you want from there you can use hot glue black hot glue would work really well or some kind of tape to go across here and cover all that stuff up so let's carry on with the dismantling of the case and talk about some other features and some ways to Route cables so I'm going to go ahead and remove these four corner screws and these four screws right here next to the power switch all right so I've removed all those screws we're going to lift up the left and right top plates do keep in mind there are screws and washers there so don't lose those and now you can see the inside of the air ducts here so we've got a fan here a fan here and we've got some dust filters now these will not come on all of the cases we only have enough for a certain amount I can't remember exactly how many so keep that in mind yours may not come with these but as you can see here it's about an eighth inch quarter inch or so you know little foam so you can see they're really thin here and you can just buy these on Amazon cut them up with scissors so they just rest here on these little platforms on either side and that is the inside now while we're here you'll be able to see the cable routing on the side of the case so see this little cover here you can grab a screwdriver and stick it into the side here and just pop up this little cover like so there we go that's what that looks like and this guy is going to cover up this huge area here for routing cable so let's say you want you know the HDMI out of your atem to run through here you could run it through here up inside of the side of the case and then out through this spot right here so if I put this piece back on you'll see that there's a little spot here for a cable to go into the lid of the case to a monitor or something like that there's also a spot here which goes into this little trap door you can pull out see what that piece looks like right there that slides in right here to keep air from getting into the case this way and that's how the cable for the fan gets into this chamber but you could run other stuff there you could punch a hole through the side here there's actually one already right here if you wanted to use like a cold shoe on the side of the case so you could run cables all over this thing and then just reinstall this little trapdoor like that so a lot of options but I did want to show this particular one here because this is a great way to get power and HDMI up into the lid of the case if you do do something like that I would highly recommend the mono price cables they're really really thin I talked about them in my original A10 video so like a foot foot and a half would do a great job of running wherever you need to run it so at this point we're going to put it all back together we're going to install it into a Pelican case and get this party started so let's go ahead and start by reattaching some of these parts so I'm going to take the cable cover here I'll go ahead and slide that in place it kind of clicks down until it is nice and flush with the rest of this piece here we can now reinstall the fan filters if they come with your case just like that they just kind of rest in there now I'll grab the two side pieces and add them back in tighten them down of course you'd want to run your cables before that and when adding these just Loosely tighten them so don't go all the way down to fully snug because we're going to want to slightly adjust these when we get them in the case because if you can see here they can move around a little bit and this will really help us make a nice tight fit in the case because once it's in we can butt this thing up against the side of the case and snug it up right so now that we have the sides on we can take our cover here and install it I'm just going to pretend we had soldered a bunch of stuff down here but of course you don't have to do that at all if you don't want to so we're going to slide this in make sure it's in the correct orientation it'll want to only it one way and you can see we want a nice flush spot for the atem to rest so I'll go ahead and tighten those up it's okay if it's a little bendy and loose there because the atem is going to hold it in place we can throw our atem on here grab our clamps go ahead and throw those in there slot them in nicely give them a little jiggle to make sure they're seated in their little spot then we'll go ahead and switch bits here and I'll go ahead and tighten those up again we have a bolt or screw and a washer so that way we don't crack anything and take it easy here you don't have to go crazy with these guys and if the atem isn't fitting that's because you probably snugged up this piece here and they're not able to move around because you want it to be able to be nice flush from this point to this point and now we have our base ready to go into our case and at this point we could talk about what you need to do to your 1170 Pelican case so let me set this aside for a second grab our Pelican case and talk about the mods now there's only one thing you have to do to get this to fit and that is to make a cutout on the back of the case and this cutout is going to be between this rear fin here and this fin here so I'll go ahead and highlight what that looks like and where you need to cut so again we're going to have a big cutting opening all the way through here you can watch my original video to see how I cut that and how you could do that you could use a jigsaw with a plastic cutting blade or just handsaw like it did in that video so I'm going to set this case aside and bring in our test case now there's a bunch of holes in this case don't worry about that so this is our test case we did a lot of gnarly things to test out and see what we could do with the A10 Mini case originally so really again if I flip it to the back the only thing you need to do is make that cut out in the rear so ignore this and those this is all you have to do if you want to you can also make holes on the bottom to match the holes on the rear of this case here so if I flip it over you can see there are one two three four mounting posts or threads here that are brass brass inserts so you could use the included screws that are going to come with this thing they're already pre-screwed in you could just loosen them and not use them or drill the holes if you aren't going to drill the holes I would just recommend once you get this thing close to seated add a little bit of super glue or hot glue and you'll be good to go so I've got the case open here obviously our kit does not come with a display you can use just a basic camera monitor or Source some kind of panel to go here so that's totally up to you so now let's actually insert this bad boy into the case so what you're going to want to do is angle it toward the bottom back so that this part of the case that bump out sticks out through that coal we cut earlier so I line that up and just let it kind of fall into place here just like so at this point I would recommend getting your screwdriver loosening these four outside screws as well as these four next to the power so they can kind of shift around you can just make sure everything's nicely seated together so I already have them loose here things are feeling pretty good we can fit the A10 nicely it's nice and flush and there's no huge gaps around the outside of the case there really shouldn't be it's designed using CAD drawings to perfectly match the inside of this case so once you're happy with that you can now go ahead and just go around and tighten things up and honestly you really don't have to use the screws on the bottom of this case again I just love over build stuff so I over build everything I do so if you don't want to use those screws you know a little bit of glue would do the trick but this is a pretty snug fit the only reason I would want to maybe use the screws is if you're going to have a really expensive panel in the display you know the lid of the case and you don't want this thing to potentially slide up and hit it but once we get this nice and secure it's pretty doggone in there and at this point it's going to be kind of difficult to get this back out you need to remove the atem kind of get in there and pull up yeah a little bit of hot glue on the bottom would probably do the trick and Now ladies and gentlemen that's what the back looks like I'll flip it around you've got access to all your A10 ports here you could fashion some kind of cover for this if you wanted to I can grab my power connector here and go ahead and plug it right into the atem and I still can access the ethernet Jack there a little bit of glue in there might be you know something you want to do again I'm just constantly over building things and that's really it so now you have an A10 Mini case you slap any kind of monitor in the lid that fits and that you like and you're good to go so that is an overview of this DIY A2 Mini case kit you are going to get everything you saw in this video they're mostly going to be black we have one special edition Trooper white here the only thing you may not get is going to be those filters so these foam filters here some cases are going to have them some are not unfortunately and then we'll also throw in some other random cables because you know you can never have enough angled uh Power connectors stuff like that so you'll get all the cables and harnesses we talked about but I'm also just going to throw in some random stuff for you diy-ers out there who may want just some extra Hardware to work with and that's going to wrap up this overview video if you want to learn more about pricing and other stuff check the information down in the description thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in our next video

Channel: Camera Foundry

Views: 6,184

Keywords:

Id: 5DjIPj7RbjQ

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023