Spectrum gets an upgrade

Before all the parts can come together the Pi has to be fitted to the case of the Spectrum so that everything can be located and engineered into place correctly.

The ruling element here was the HDMI socket.  This was going to be the hardest part to remove if it came to that due to the amount of fine pitch surface mount pins.  I do have the equipment to do this but the way I see it, why make life hard ?

The solution was to mount it so that the HDMI was sat  near to one of the cut outs already in the Spectrum case.  This location also allowed me to keep the ethernet port fixed to the board.  The less that could be de-soldered the less likely any damage would occur to the Pi itself.

In order for the Pi to fit in this location of the case a few additional components had to be removed.  The audio jack and composite video plug are pretty useless so they went straight away.  The twin stack USB port had to be remove as it was too high, this will be replaced by a USB hub at a later date.

The GPIO (general purpose in/out) port also had to go, interestingly the Spectrum had a very similar expansion slot which protruded out of the back so the idea here was to emulate that with this build using a ribbon connector to extend the Pi's GPIO, again at a later date.

The Pi is held in by 2x counter sunk screws into the case with a small stand off.  I also added a small heat sink for the CPU/GPU/RAM chip for good measure.  Note the Pi will not be powered by the micro USB port in the bottom left, this is because it will interfere with the case screws.  Therefore the 5V power will come in via a fuse into test points TP1 and TP2, I fitted two pins onto these locations for the power wires fitted later.

The hole in the back of the case was slightly enlarged to accommodate the HDMI port and the whole thing is ready to be test assembled.