I have been toying with the idea recently of purchasing a battlelight for my desktop, i like to game in the dark, but i also like my desk to be illuminated enough to see the keyboad properly. My keyboard is backlit, which means i can differenciate between ‘W’ and ‘E’ (or in my keyboard layout, forward and action) but it just doesn’t cut it. I want more light focussed on my desk and keyboard area without the room being drowned in light.

The choice was simple enough, either cough up ~£20 for a battlelight or build my own using spare parts i had lying around.

This is what i used:

2 x cold cathode tubes
1 x 12v power inverter
1 x simple switch
1 x molex connector (a fan one preferbale)
A soldering iron
Double sided mounting tape
Electrical Tape

I had a couple of cold cathode kits lying around that had been used in other PC’s, i had to butcher them so i could use the double socket power inverter to connect two cathode tubes, but also the switch with from the single socket power inverter kit.

When i had the parts i soldered the new leads to the PCB on the power inverter, i then split the live wire and connected the switch. Once everything had been soldered in place i covered each of the joins with electrical tape.

When done the finished product looked like this:

I then connected the molex to the PSU’s external molex socket, if your PSU does not have one of these you could run the cable via a watercooling hole, or take out a spare PCI cover and run the molex connecter through that.

Then i fired up the PC switched on the battle-light and basked in the glow!