By feldgendler. Wednesday, 23. January 2008, 20:00:00
controller, Julien, Arjan, Anders
...
On Wednesday, we moved on with our controller board construction.
Adam and
Arjan did all the interconnections between the controller board components. The
PCB connects to both joysticks (they have one microswitch for each of the four directions) and to most of the buttons according to the assembly manual; it also plugs into the computer and acts as a USB keyboard. The trackball connects to the buttons that do left and right mouse clicks (those are in the top-left and top-right corners on our controller panel); the computer regards it as a USB mouse.
Adam
screwed the joystics and the trackball to the controller panel. He also
drilled holes in the sides of the cabinet for pinball flipper puttons, and installed buttons into the holes. In the back wall of the cabinet,
Anders and Adam cut two holes with the
jigsaw and mounted a power switch and an Ethernet socket. Later we'll run the power and network lines through these, but for now we just connected the hardware through the open back door.
Meanwhile, Anders installed a computer inside the cabinet, connected the monitor, keyboard and the speakers, and powered the system up. For the first time, the screen of the arcade machine went up!
Julien installed and configured the operating system.
Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
By feldgendler. Tuesday, 22. January 2008, 20:00:00
Adam, George, controller, Per Arne
...
We've made a great progress on Monday, but the holes for buttons and the trackball were too deep for them to sit nicely. We needed to make grooves in the wooden panel where the buttons and trackball would be mounted. To carve out the grooves, we used a
wood router. It was easy with the button holes, but the large figured slot for the trackball took a lot of time and effort:
George,
Arjan,
Adam and
Per Arne took turns at cutting the wood. Finally, we had a nice controller panel where all the buttons and the trackball would fit perfectly.
The controller hardware we chose is
X-Arcade, known for their indestructible buttons and joysticks. They offer a full range of products up to a complete arcade machine, but we're building our own, right? That's why we went for the
Build Your Own Arcade Kit (two joysticks, a bunch of buttons, and a controller
PCB that emulates a PS/2 or USB keyboard) and a
3" Arcade Trackball Mouse Assembly (a trackball unit and a few buttons). At last two links you'll find pictures, descriptions and PDF manuals for those who are interested in building their own arcade machine.
Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
By feldgendler. Monday, 21. January 2008, 20:00:00
organization, controller, Huib, Arjan
...
Most of the other parts of the arcade machine were done, so on Monday it was time to work on the gaming controls.
Huib and
Adam designed the layout of the controller board in Google SketchUp, a 3D editor available free of charge
for Mac and Windows. You can
download our design in this editor's own format, but we've also converted it for you to a bunch of popular 3D (
3DS Max,
DXF,
VRML) and 2D (
PDF,
JPEG) formats.
We decided that our controller board would have a trackball in the middle (it's a modern arcade that can browse the web, too!) and two joysticks, one for each player. On each player's side, there would be a set of buttons:
- Four general purpose gaming buttons
- A Start button
- One of the mouse buttons that work together with the trackball
- Pause button on the left side and exit button on the right
There would also be an extra gaming button on each of the sides of the cabinet for pinball games.
The top view of the controller board layout has been printed out to guide us when making the board. Adam
drilled the holes for buttons and joysticks and cut the big hole for the trackball with the
hole saw.
Also,
Arjan and Adam made some parts of the cabinet really smooth with the help of sanding paper.
Note: All hyperlinks in this post take you to more pictures. You can also view all the pictures from this event.
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