I turned an old Military multi-meter into a case for my PC, a picture of the finished setup is below. There are a few photos of the build – they very sparsely cover the build, but at least give a pointer into the how I constructed the unit.
I bought the multi-meter from eBay, you can search for redundant electronics online. Units like this are by no means low-cost, but otherwise very difficult to simply come across items like this that someone is willing just to give away.
After taking apart the whole unit, keeping a rough track of the fittings, it needed a really good clean. I imagine many of the chemicals to be harmful, so I was very careful when cleaning it.This is inside the unit – I used masking tape to cover the electronics and surfaces I wanted to protect and used standard spray paint to coat the inside. This was just to act as a protective layer.Some of the plates inside had begun to corrode, so I sprayed them with direct-to-rust paint to protect them.The PC in question is a Mini-ITX with an Intel Atom. I needed a size that would fit into a small space – I run Ubuntu off an SSD so the PC is fast enough and I save all heavy-work for my main PC.I fit the plates back onto the front cover, these will hold the analogue display.I drilled 3, 5mm holes into the bottom of the analogue display and put 3, 5mm yellow LEDs on some vero board to up-light the display.Fitting the analogue display, now with the up-lighting LEDs into the plates that secure it to the front plate.Although there is not a use for all the buttons and switches on the front cover, I have wired them into a PCB so that I can use them at a later date when I think of what I could use them for. I also wired in the 5V and 12V from the PC PSU so that I have power going to the LEDs.
