Color Changing Digital PC Fan Controller

Step 9 Finish inserting components, make cables.

Once you've finished inserting components, you need to make the cables.  The board should have components in every spot.  You'll need to make 2 cables (Power and Data), attach a pin connector to the RGB LED's on the fan, and make sure the fan's 3-pin connector fits the 3-pin connector here.  Also, if you haven't done so already, insert the two IC's into their sockets making sure you get them in the correct orientation.

To make the power cable, take a 4-pin section of the rectangular connector and solder wires to each pin.  The two in the middle are ground, the one on the left (as according to the picture) is +12V, and the one on the right is +5V.  The other end is a standard 4-pin Molex connector that connects to your PC's power supply.

For the serial cable, one end is a 3-pin section from the rectangular connector.  I soldered a 3-pin ribbon cable on to it, the top-most pin according to the image below is ground, under that is Rx from the PC, and the front-most pin is Tx from the PC.  If your PC has an internal COM port (a 10-pin header on the motherboard near the rear COM port, usually has one corner pin removed), use a 5x2 rectangular connector (or 2 strips of 5 glued together, or just 3 individual ones since you only need 3 pins connected to that block) and solder them.  You may have to look up the exact pinout of the motherboard header.  Otherwise just solder a standard DB-9 female connector to it, run it out the back of your PC, and plug it into the rear port.

If you want to use USB, you can use a USB to serial adapter and modify it to connect to the serial port, or you can take the attached Eagle PCB file and modify it to use an FTDI chip instead of a MAX232, but that is beyond the scope of this Instructable.