The RGB Chair NO ONE asked for
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,144 words · ~5 min read
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here at the lonus Media Group optomechanics and medical mood lighting
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research facility we firmly believe in
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pushing the boundaries of RGB technology
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and today you'll witness the fruit of
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literally several hours of planning
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Behold our allnew electromagnetic
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ergonomics device the Raba chair
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the be quiet! purebase 600 features a versatile design noise isolation and is
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optimized for different liquid radiator configurations learn more at the link
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below have you ever been sitting there in the dark admiring your RGB computer
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and thought gee why doesn't my chair also have RGB
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lighting well I was and I did so I sent
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an email off to cable mod and before I knew it a massive box of LED strips
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arrived at the office I mean man I thought we were RGB crazy then those
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guys were all like get on my
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level anyway step one was to find a
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chair the one we chose for the job was the verar 350 we hoped its mesh backing
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would allow our lighting effects to shine through and the cool swoopy
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construction would give us tons of options for mounting our adhesive backed
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RGB strips next we needed to pop open some
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packages and mock up how we thought the RGB strips might mount on the chair
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using our preferred method of mechanical fastening generic zip ties we tried a
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few different configurations finally settling on this this process process
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helped us find the best routing for the strips around the chair without ruing
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the precious adhesive which we'll need later on and without getting a bunch of
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extra wires cluttering up our build
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speaking of things we'll need later on though we hadn't quite figured out by
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this stage how we were going to power the lights so we tested the strips the
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dirty Way by having an RGB tail hanging
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out and connecting them directly to a
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motherboard looks fantastic I mean man
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could there be anything more beautiful on this Earth I don't think
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so obviously though there are a few
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suboptimal things about this method for example moving around is something
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that's nice to be able to do you don't want to risk tearing out your
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motherboard if you need to spin quickly and deal with a cat vomit situation and
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being a able to put the side panel on your rig is an extra bonus so with those
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things in mind we set to work cleaning up the chair extra attention and Care
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was taken to be sure that the adhesive on the cable mod cables could hold onto
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the chair while bending around its complex and seductive curves we used zip
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ties to help out wherever possible but in some places even those wouldn't be
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able to save us if the adhesive wasn't able to hold the strips on learning from
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the mistakes we made during the mockup phase we upgraded the lighting setup at
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this stage to ensure that even where the sun don't shine our chair would we added
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ass lighting with the only part of the chair left naked being the
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headrest The Next Step was probably the most difficult we needed to achieve
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Wireless operation initially we were thinking we'd try making our own RGB
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controller with an Arduino so to control
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each ch panel we connected mosfets to the pwm outputs allowing us to adjust
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the brightness of red green and blue independently fun fact when the RGB
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strip was attached to our bench power supply we noticed that the power drawn
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was heavily color dependent we knew that blue light has a higher energy than red
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light but we were still surprised by how big the change in power was blue
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consumed five times the power of red
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anyway what we were hoping to achieve with this was to use two arduinos one
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connected to the ASUS or a sync port on the motherboard that then sends data
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wirelessly to a second on the chair that sinks between the chair and the computer
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unfortunately while this would have been possible using XPS our arduinos did not
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have the wireless Shields and at this point we didn't have the time to spend
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waiting on them to arrive maybe the RGB
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chair will make an appearance with this upgrade at some point in the
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future anyway we settled on cable mods
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included solution for now this does waste some of the excellent work we did
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on the Arduino but it makes it simpler to use more reliable and much easier for
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our viewers at home to replicate so to power the strips we simply velcroed a
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battery Bank to the bottom of our chair then adapted the included 12volt output
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wires to work with our cable mod controller sure a 23,000 Milah battery
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Bank might seem slightly Overkill but
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come on man we're lonus Tech tips and with this sucker on here you'll get an
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estimated 50 hours of RGB chair fun in
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between charges bringing us finally to
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the oh oh crap we forgot our pre-flight
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check battery check connections check
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Fat Beat check totally unnecessary check we are
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good to go
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look at that I've got one right here we never we are never far from an iFixit
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prot tool kit this thing is flipping awesome it includes the 64bit driver kit
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which is held in place by freaking magnets I mean how cool is that it
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includes their prying tools their
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spudgers their uh ESD safe tweezers
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their ESD wrist trrap their uh suction
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cups for pulling screens off it includes pretty much everything you could
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possibly need to take apart and repair
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your electronics because damn it you paid for that stuff you should be
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allowed to fix it and they've got tons of great guides on the ifixit.com
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website that will help you save money
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you can usually and this is from my personal experience
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buy the tools that you would need from my fix it in place of paying someone
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else to do it one time and then you have everything you need forever so head over
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to ifixit.com Linus and use code Linus
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at the checkout to save five bucks on your next tool purchase of $10 or
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more so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video then quit being a
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hater RGB is the future and if you like this video hit that like button get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we feature
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at the link in the video description also down there is a link to where to
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wait uh yeah merch store and the other thing that I usually say right our
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community Forum which you should totally join