Opera Widget Arcade

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.

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