Mac Hacks (36 page)

Next, strip your 8 GB flash drive of its casing, wrap it in tape
or heatshrink, and then attach it to the hub. Then glue the hub down in
the corner of your empty optical drive bay so it’s out of the way. Take
this time to tape your touchscreen controller to the bottom of the LCD
panel. Keep it out of the way, shorten the USB cable that attaches to
the hub to the shortest length possible without making it ballshard to
connect when you’re reattaching the top case.

Now it’s time to install your rear-facing camera! For this part, I
used an iSight from a 17” Intel iMac. You can use an iSight from any 15”
or 17” iMac G5, or 17” or 20” white Intel iMac, or just about any iSight
camera—or even just a USB webcam like
Macam
where the pinout
is available. Since almost all iSights are just USB, it’s fairly easy to
ascertain the pinout.

Grab your iSight and pop out the clips for the plastic bezel
holding the lens. Gently detach the lens from the bezel (it may be glued
on; I’ve encountered some that were and some that weren’t). Again, go
slowly—the lens and ribbon can be damaged very easily. Next, cut the
bezel using snips so it can be turned down at a 90 degree angle instead
of forward. Drill a hole in your optical bay roughly the size of the
glass lens protector (this piece doesn’t help with image modulation, it
just protects the lens from debris/dust), and then pop the bezel/lens
protector in. Check your orientation and then glue the bezel in place.
Since the glass is a cube rather than a sphere, there may be some space
in between the two. If so, use a little Sugru and neaten it up. I also
used a couple of foam pads to lift up the board to the right height; use
your best judgment to determine that. Once everything is dry, attach the
board!

Now, it’s time to wire it up. I know it’s tempting to plug that
iSight into an iLink (FireWire) cable and fire it up, but
don’t do it
. The board is not actually FireWire;
despite its connector, it’s
USB
. Check the wire
colors if you don’t believe me! You can actually just snip off that end,
since we’re not going to use it. Get a male USB A end, and solder it
onto the iSight, matching the wire colors (
Figure 11-29
). Done! For
sanity, you should boot up your system and plug your iSight in to
double-check that the port works. If everything’s good, tack your lens
to the plastic bezel, tack the board down, and then clean up those
wires!

Figure 11-29. The iSight in place and wired up to a USB cable.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking “Where are we putting the inverter?”
I’m getting to that. I moved my inverter to the empty optical drive bay
with the rest of the components. It’s a four-wire connection, and can be
extended without knowing the pinout. Cut a single wire at a time, and
attach it to your extension. Seal the connections with heatshrink
tubing. IDE/floppy ribbon cables are the perfect size for these
extensions, and are quite easy to deal with. (40-pin and 80-pin cables
don’t work very well.)

Next, we need to make sure the top case has four magnetic objects
to attach itself to when we close the case. I took a water-damaged scrap
top case that I had and popped off the two metal alloy pads that the lid
uses to grip the bottom case. I then glued them in their respective
places on the bottom case. That covers the lower area. For the top...I
used razor blades with tape over the blades. I don’t recommend that
method. Any rectangular piece of metal (preferably
not
sharp) will work, but not all alloys are
magnetic! Glue them in place in the corners of the fan strut. Done! (See
Figure 11-30
.)

Figure 11-30. Razor blades taped in place to act as catches for the
case.

We’re in the home stretch here. Solder two wires onto the pins of
the sleep switch as shown in
Figure 11-31
. Then run these
two wires to your toggle switch. Now, when the switch is in the on
position, the system will think the lid is closed and go into sleep
mode. Open the switch, and the computer wakes up.

Figure 11-31. The switch used to sleep and wake the MessagePad.

I used Sugru to seal the optical drive slot and smooth out the
side of the case, as well as seal the areas where the hinges previously
were. You can also protect the bottom of the user-facing iSight with a
bit of Sugru. It really works wonders.

Finally, install your SSD (see
[Hack #48]
), RAM cover, and
battery. Then attach all of the cables for your top case, route the
cables so they aren’t stressed when the bezelid is shut. Let the magnets
hold the two pieces together and...you’re done! Boot it up. Revel in the
glory and wonders of your own Mac OS X tablet.

After
all that, it’s time to install some software that’ll make
using this thing easier (and possible). You’ll want a copy of
MacFlip
, a free,
accelerometer-based screen-orientation app made for the Axiotron
Modbook. You
may also want to install
smcFanControl
,
which lets you tweak the speed of the device’s fans so they vary based
on power state.

To enable the onscreen keyboard, head to System
Preferences→Language & Text, click the Input Sources button, and
then check the box next to Keyboard & Character Viewer. Once that’s
done, you’ll see a keyboard-like icon in the menu bar. Click that icon
and, in the drop-down menu, select Show Keyboard Viewer. Voilà—an
onscreen keyboard will appear!

Now you’re
all done!
Hug pandas. Eat cake and
initiate a sugar coma.

This device isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty cool. Here are some
things I’ve learned from using it:

—
Phil Herlihy