We're going to need more than Mick Jagger to start this up

It's never at the beginning of a project that you pick up pretty significant issues, it's more deep into things when you suddenly go 'Now why didn't I see this earlier?'. Current case in point, my lack of a case has suddenly made me realize what else I'm missing here. 
Namely, an on button. Unless I want to continually jump start this project with a screwdriver, I probably should find a way to get it to start ultimately..

NO REMIX TO IGNITION HERE

All PC cases have either a front, top or side panel with at least an on/off button and possibly a reset one right next to it. And inside the case there's a series of wires from these panels ending in a nice little block connector that you plug into the motherboard in one snug fit and suddenly you have the power to turn things on and off as well as reset, as well as get the led lights in your panel working for the hard disk reading etc etc.***

*Provided you have all these features
**And provided you've plugged in everything else correctly. 

Motherboard front panel header

(This is where the plug goes into on the board I'm using and I'm very grateful for Gigabyte for color coding things here so you don't have to squint if you have eyes like mine. At a bare minimum I'm going to need something to bridge the pins in the red zone POWER and it would be nice to have RESET green up and running as well.) 

Here I have none of those and not even a busted old case that I could remove parts of the panel from. Which leaves either tracking an old case down on Facebook Marketplace to cannibalize (seems counterproductive really since I may as well use the case) or find something else handy.

Luckily I had a thought on this a couple of days ago and after a quick consulting of the Oracle (Google) I found out that yes it'll work just fine. 

A COMPUTER POWER SWITCH ISN'T CONSTANTLY IN THE ON POSITION

Unlike a light switch, a computer power switch doesn't have to be in the constant ON position the while time it's running, Because there's constant power running through the board, all the switch needs to to is momentarily bridge the two pins of the PC on switch and that's all it needs to understand 'Right then, go time!' 

Which means something like this will not work because it would keep the on as a constant on,. 

Toggle switch

And that's a bit of a shame really because personally I'd love to whip up a 3d print assisted board with a couple of these for that real garage project look. What we need here is a momentary switch and luckily there's more than a few options available, such as:

But there's no need to rush out and buy one of these at this stage (maybe later down the track) when I have plenty of momentary button switches in the garage already! I talk of the greatest example of a momentary switch, the humble arcade button!

Discovering how cheap and effective they are years ago when I built my own arcade cabinet (one of my first garage projects pretty much) I'm very happy to report that being a momentary button, this will suit my purposes perfectly. And I have more than I need thanks to some arcade projects I'm no longer using. 

The button itself is just a plastic shell with a spring inside, the part that sends the signal to where it needs to go is under and partially inside the button (and can easily be twisted out.) At a base level you only need two wires from the clicker unit itself but since these are light up arcade buttons, to get them illuminated again I'll need to tap into some 5V power on the board or probably just as easy, using the 5V rail on the power supply itself. Light certainly isn't necessary for performance here, it's just looks sleeker obviously. 

(Edit: Google has pointed out that the first two pins on the board's USB header are 5V so that's perfect and it's highly unlikely I'm going to need to add anything else to those headers.)

Now it's time to solder the arcade wiring to some connectors for the motherboard pin and see how we go!

I SWEAR I HAD SOME HEAT SHRINK AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE...

...but I can currently find no hide nor hair of it or the small plastic box it lives in, so some insulation tape will have to do. The connectors I ended up using were some socket to socket jumper leads I had from a previous project but I couldn't scrounge up more than a couple in all of the garage mess so all we've got at this stage is a power button. If I shut down/reset things from the Window's menu I can get away without a second button for now so after work today I sealed up the soldered wires with some tape, plugged things in, plugged the PSU to the wall power, pressed the button and...

...it's alive! ALIVE!

Well okay, it's just the PSU fan spinning at the moment because this board had no power lights and with no monitor hooked up yet, I can't see if it's posting. But my arcade starter is connected to the motherboard and the MB did tell the power supply to start singing the song of it's people with just a single push of the button so that's a cracking start!

Now that I know I can use other buttons for other things, it's time to find and wire in a monitor as well as design up a 3D printed enclosure to house this starter and whatever I decide comes next. Oh and install things yada yada, but baby steps first and all that.

ON A SIDE NOTE

Speaking of printing, I noticed when moving the board around to look at the pins that both the graphics card and WiFi card was a little loose. So with a couple of minutes of measuring things up with a pair of digital calipers, 5 mins of design work in Tinkercard and 12 minutes later on the printer, this little piece now prevents both cards falling into each other and offers up a bit more structural support if I need to turn the board again.

It's all coming together nicely so far!