[Autocrat]

Hi,

I want to make case lights from a CCFL and an inverter that I took out from a laptop LCD. I am not sure though, that should the inverter be connected to the 5V DC Supply in the case or the 12V one.

The inverter has six wires for input:

Black Brown Red Orange Yellow Green

Now how am I going to hook it up to a 4 Pin Molex Peripheral connector in the PC? I googled up to find that the Brown one in for supply voltage. The orange one is at 0V. Yellow one is for Brightness control voltage and the Green one is at 3.3 V.

The Red and Black wires are left out. What do I do with these? Also, I am not going to supply any brightness control voltage hence making it glow at its brightest but what about the 3.3 V one? Is it used for on/off? Where do I get 3.3 V in the CPU? The AUX connector? Is it really needed?

[bodom658]

The inverter should have some sort of specification telling what voltage you need, or what model it is, then you can look up the datasheet and get the specs from that.

Don't go off on a whim and just give it 5 or 12 volts without checking, undervoltage is just as bad as overvoltage and can cause permanent damage to your components.

To be honest, I would look up the model and find out explicitly what each wire is for. They are all there, so they should all be important. You could end up with floating nodes, ground imbalances, and whatever else that could end up killing your rig. The 3.3V is definetly needed, as there are components in whatever you are connecting it to that require 3.3V instead of 5 or 12V, and no voltage regulation is present in the device, perhaps to cut down on costs (though, to be honest, a 3.3V regulator can't be more than a dollar or two, but seeing as how 5V to 3.3V are harder to come by, this may be an indication that it's 5V. Not a definate, but don't go setting things on fire now.)