A lot of time and patience

I was watching the footy (the Wolves winning for once) on the telly with Dad, so decided to be productive as well. I know you can buy some wire for pennies, but I have a load of cat5 cable lying around from a previous job, and I thought, "I'm sure that stripped out cat5 would be perfect as the cabling for the control panel" - so I spent the next 90 minutes shouting at the telly, and stripping/cutting a bunch of cat5.

An hour's soldering later (to solder on the female crimp connectors to slot onto the micro-switches) and I end up with this:

[caption id="attachment_210" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="wiring 1"][/caption]

I've daisy-chained all the ground wire together as there is only 1 ground screw connector on the IPAC to screw it into.

I know it's messy, and I'll tidy it up at some point, but this was the inside - just player 1 wired up for testing/debugging (i.e. finding that I'd wired the wrong wire into the connector block) :

[caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="wiring: inside - early"][/caption]

That night, while the kids were asleep, I wired up 2UP, screwed the IPAC down, and tested it out on the 5 year old in the morning:

[caption id="attachment_212" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="his first test"][/caption]

As you can see, all good.

I now have to resist the temptation to leave the project for a bit - as you can see, it works, so I need to push on and make the rest of the cabinet - work's looking busy though - no idea when I'll have some more time????

Illuminate.

I'm getting quite quick at this.

Today I only had an hour spare and I entirely built (not painted) the "above marquee" panel, from an odd shape piece of 9mm MDF that I had left over.  This had sat underneath the panels I had painted, so is a bit messy on one side as you'll see in the pictures.

With only 1 face that was cut at the factory, I ran the piece through the table saw 3 times to get 4 square sides, then trimmed to 2' (60cm)  width.  Using the router, I rounded over the outer face, front edge (as per the under marquee panel) offered it up to the cab, marked it for length, and cut to length.

At this point, time to install the last of the electronics (bar the PC) the marquee light.  I have an old 20" (~50cm) strip light in my spares box in the garage, so I've decided the best way to install this is on the reverse side of this above marquee panel (this has the most available space and close enough to the top panel.)  I've used some 1/4" (~6mm) thick hard rubber strip to separate the housing of the strip light from the wood (I'm thinking heat insulation but I could be mad) PVA'ed into place, and screwed the strip light, through the rubber into the MDF.  The rubber layer adds some additional thickness so that the 1/2" (12mm) screws don't burst through the other side of the 9mm MDF.  At this stage, I've also wired the light with a standard plug on the other end.  I meant to put a switch part way through the length of the cable, but I forgot.  I can always revisit this if I decide I want to have the option of lights on or off.

The following photograph shows the underside of the finished (bar painting) above marquee panel.



and with it installed



Lights!



OK - I suspected this might be a problem, as I'd read similar marquee issues on other cab building sites.

The light is bleeding through the black sections of my artwork terribly - washing them out in a hazy grey colour.  Not good.  Solutions I have read about include printing the artwork twice then cutting out the non-black parts to leave a black template to stick under the finished logo, in essence making the black sections twice as thick.  I don't really have that option without begging my brother for another print run (and my favour account is in the red) so at some later point, I'll whip out the marquee, and paint black on the non-visible side to control the light bleed.  As there's no back yet constructed, you can see the light pouring out the back - I'll have to think about some form of reflector pushing all the light forward if too much bleeds out of the cracks.  That's an unknown until we're nearly complete.

My enthusiasm is re-stoked, but I'm now out of MDF.  I'll need a trip to my timber yard again before I can carry on.  Hopefully the weekend if not before.

Here's the cabinet as at now!



Next panel in the plan - the angled vent panel!

Speaker Panel - Electronics

After lunch yesterday I set about the speaker electronics.

I have a bunch of speaker "guts" that I ripped (carefully of course) from a cheap (fiver ($10)) set of speakers I got from eBay.



On the inside of the speaker panel, I mounted the odd shaped speakers as close to centre of the "speaker holes" I cut in the panel, with a few 1/2" (12mm) screws - I almost burst through the facing surface with one screw tip so I was very careful with the rest.



I've had a real debate with myself about the speaker controls - there are going to be times when I want to adjust, as a minimum, the volume if not the bass/treble, so how can I get at the controls without compromising the semi-authentic look I am going for?

I could cut a little hole in the speaker panel and adjust the volume with a small screwdriver, I could mount the speaker controls on the top or back, etc.

I've decided that I'll mount the controls on the back of the speaker panel, and access them through the "vent panel" (to be constructed) and somehow make the vent panel "quick release" - by doing this, I can also put the controls for the marquee backlight here and access those too - maybe even the USB ports I intend to install, although I still think I want those more accessible - a decision for another day.

So the controls and the AC/DC transformer are mounted in the centre of the inside of the speaker panel. One concern I have is the heat generated by the transformer - these do get warm and I've mounted it in direct contact with wood - not inspiring. I'll keep an eye on this and run the speakers for several hours - if I'm concerned enough I'll drop a little metal panel between the transformer and the wood. I sense this is more likely than less, as I'm not keen an explaining to the wife why and how the house burnt down.



You'll see that I had to cut plenty of wires to get the "guts" out of the speakers, as such, there is now plenty of soldering and repairing of cut wires, and a tidy up job on the wiring using my handy cable tie mounts.



Hook it up to my iPod for a quick test - works first time, no crackling or interference. An unexpected but not unpleasant effect is that the sound is a little muffled at a distance and at angles if the listener is not directly under the angled speaker cutouts, but perfectly clear and sparkly directly undernearth - this seems very reminiscent of my childhood memories of arcade machine sounds so I'm not unhappy at all.

THE REAL TEST!

Now that I have the speakers, monitor, and controls all working, time for a "REAL" test - I hook up the cables to my "as yet unmodified (as in, still in it's pale cream case)" PC and run the latest version of my gMame interface software available at sourceforge (for those joining us late, I'm writing my own interface software in Java as well as constructing the cabinet) - it's all working beautifully, and using the arcade controls with my software is working really well.

I'm a very happy bunny at this stage. The only panels left are non-electronic ones, except for the panel that will house the reconstructed PC, and I hope to make a start on them the weekend.

Arcade Control Panel - Part 2 - Electronics

OK - I have a control panel - it's built - <bias>it looks lovely</bias> - so let's try and connect the hacked keyboard controller (see earlier posts) with the built panel, and see if we can't get it all to work.

MORE PHOTOS TO FOLLOW

The Process:

1. Install the microswitches for the joysticks and buttons


2. 6 buttons per player, 1 joystick per player (4 switches), 1 coin per player, 1 start per player, 1 game selector (the ESC key) = 25 microswitches: 2 wires per microswitch=50 connections. Each connection on each microswitch receives a 1.5mm crimp connector, so we need to make 50 wires of, let's say, 9" (~23cm) length, each with a crimp connector on one end, and the other end stripped ready to be installed in the screw block connector.


3. I made 25 white wires and 25 black wires - one for each side of the microswitch, and also, now that I know one connector has to connect to the top layer keyboard connections (see the Keyboard Hack posting for more details) and one connects to the lower layer, I know all my white wires should be together and all my black wires should be together in the screw blocks. Not a necessity, but useful for troubleshooting.


4. I don't trust crimp connectors, so after I've crimped my bunch of wires, I also drop a splodge of solder into the crimp connector to make sure I have a good connection.


5. DO THIS DIFFERENTLY - 9" per wire was way too short - I had a real struggle when it comes to screwing these all together into the block connectors - no enough play on each wire so the controller which I expected to rest several inches from the underside of the panel, actually comes to rest within a few millimetres of the underside - not ideal.


6. Time to look at my keyboard pairings again - - I look through this sheet, highlighting all the keys that my control panel will use - UP, DOWN, CTRL, ALT, etc. Now I count all the left column numbers, and all the right column numbers, so I end up with a number of wires to connect to screwblock 1, a number for screwblock connector 2, and so on for the 26 connections. So for example, if I know there are 4 wires for connection 2, I twist 4 of my white wires together, screw them into connection 2, then push the 4 crimp connectors onto one side of the 4 microswitches that will use connection no. 2. Hope this makes sense.


7. I work my way sequentially through each of the block connectors, counting the number of wires, twisting, screwing into the block, pushing the crimps onto the correct microswitch, etc, untill all 26 connections on my Keyboard Hack are complete.


8. I now have an arcade control panel with a keyboard connection - it's not been hard to do, but has taken some time - time to test it!!!!!!

So I connect this thing to my PC fire it all up and......

NOTHING - not a sausage

Pants!

Panic! - I've broken it all - the keyboard PS2 is broken again - one of my solders has shorted - i don't understand what's going on.

One Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodle, and one Stargate Atlantis episode later, and a thought occurs to me, "Do I understand how these microswitch-y thingies work?" - let's google them.

A couple of websites and some wikipedia later, and I have the answer I suspected - "No, you don't understand how they work!"

Three connections per microswitch and I need 2 - - I connected all my wires to the top connector and the bottom connector - I find out from my google-ing that a microswitch can either "make" or "break" a connection depending on which of the two side connections you connect - I had setup the switches in "click to break" mode - essentially meaning that all the keys were pressed and I pressed a button to "lift my finger off the keyboard"

Embarrased, but strengthened by the Pot Noodle, I returned to the panel, and pulled all the black connections (see, I told you the colour coding would come in useful) from the lower side connection and pushed on the upper side connection - again, this would have been a lot easier if I'd left some more length on the cables, but I managed.

Second test

It's a good job the wife and kids weren't home, cos I'd probably have terrified them with my manic whooping and jumping around.

I have a working control panel.

Picture Homer Simpson drooling over doughnuts, "UUUUUUMmmmmm Control Panel" and it doesn't quite do it justice.