Open Sesame...

THE CONTROL PANEL

Two things are on my mind this time round.  Last time, I positioned the controllers way too close to the edges of the panel, and it made it quite difficult to fit the micro-switches and cables on the buttons near the edges.  Also, because I built the whole arcade machine as one unit (two sides, one top, one bottom) it made it quite tricky to get in and around inside the control panel - if a connection was loose, I had to start unscrewing things to fix it.

So I'm going to make a stand-alone control panel (7 panels, top, slope, bottom, front, back and 2 sides) and have a single USB cable coming out of the back or possibly bottom (you'll see why when I get to the PC bit at a later date)

Something like this:

[caption id="attachment_128" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="control panel design"][/caption]

To slope or not to slope?

Surely slopes on the control panel surface is contrary to good ergonomic design, but every image of every machine I can find shows a slope.  I toyed with the idea of a flat surface so I could rest my beer on it :-), but I've gone for this little touch of authenticity.

Access to the gubbings

That problem of accessing the wiring and stuff without unscrewing the panels has got me thinking.

I am plagued with insomnia, and a night or two ago, an idea came to me that should solve this problem, and offer some opportunities to make the control panel a little more functional this time around.

This all hinges on something special - did you see what I did there?



If I add a hinge to the front lower edge, I should be able to pull up and out on the sticks, and have the whole underneath of the sticks and buttons exposed for maintenance and upgrades.

And the cream on the cake? I can stash a keyboard and a mouse in this discrete control panel unit for those tricky "if only I had a keyboard and a mouse, I could fix that little problem easily" moments.

Good, eh? Well, let's see if I can build it, then I can say whether or not it was a good idea.

And for those attention-to-detail types of you, the single USB coming out can be achieved by a little cheap hub in the control panel that has the IPAC, the keyboard, and the mouse connecting in, and one usb coming out.

Genius!