Mimic's Sister - Shapeshifter

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zestyphresh:
I didn't even realise the pedals and monitor were motorised until I saw the video, absolutely bonkers!

Laythe:

--- Quote from: zestyphresh on July 27, 2020, 07:04:46 pm ---I didn't even realise the pedals and monitor were motorised until I saw the video, absolutely bonkers!

--- End quote ---

Heh, thanks!

Technically, the pedals stay put, they are mounted to the back wall.
The control panel moves (which also moves the seat out), and the monitor rotates.

I've made some progress toward the side skirts.

First, I tapped the holes in the ends of the counterweight adjustment rail.

I was very careful when I mounted this rail, such that it is well centered and straight underneath the monitor... which of course makes it crooked on most of the rotating assembly it attaches to, due to all the 3' angles. But, the important thing here is that each end of the rail is about 0.060" short of being flush with the sides of the playfield display.

This means that when I make 0.060" thick aluminum plates that pick up these two screws on each side and mount them,

the outside faces of the aluminum are precisely flush with the outside edges of the playfield display. These will form half of my mounting brackets for the cosmetic side skirts. The skirts will carry the pinball flipper buttons and some of the force feedback elements.

There will be 4 mounting screws per bracket, going out from the inside, through holes in these brackets into thread inserts into the 7/16" plywood skirts. You can see centerpunch marks in the bracket where these screws will land.

Here's the initial layout for the side skirts.

You can see all the nudging around and remeasuring I did for the flipper button location prior to drilling it out. These skirts are 4 3/4" high, about 41" long, and form a 6' parallelogram, with the incline of the table going to vertical ends to clear the front and back cabinet during rotation. I've found the machinist angle blocks you can see by the pencil to be extremely handy for doing this kind of layout, that's a 4' and 2' stacked to make a reference 6' wedge.

I drilled the bracket holes, cut the skirts out, then carefully held the skirts exactly where I want them to land and transferred the four mount holes. Took the brackets off, and transferred the center holes as well, because I don't have the ability to countersink these bracket screws completely, so there's going to be relief cuts in the skirts to clear the screwheads you saw holding the brackets on above.

Shapeshifter shouldn't have hardware showing on the outside of the skirts. I am adamant about this. The mounting screws are going to have the heads inside under the playfield, and be blind, into thread inserts that are also blind. So, I drilled blind holes with the depth stop on my drill press. Here's the side skirt, held up to a bright light behind it.

Thin, but it'll hold primer and paint. :D

I ended up having to go to 6-32 hardware to get the thread inserts to be short enough not to blow through 7/16 plywood.

They are pretty small, but there will be 8 of them holding each skirt, and any impact loading from whacking the flipper buttons is going into the brackets, not out or side-loading. I am confident these will be fine.

I sunk the thread inserts VERY CAREFULLY from the back side, got them just slightly below flush, and didn't have any protrusion on the user facing side. Success!

Here's the mockup of what the skirts look like, installed. The 1" aluminum angle set on top is just sitting there to give an idea of what this is going to look like, it still needs to be trimmed to angle and length. Imagine that this bare plywood was the same bright red as the front and rear cabinets; that's going to be my last big painting job.

Currently, the skirts are only held on by the four screws in the rear brackets - I still have some fabrication to do to make the front brackets and anchors.

Next up, though, is force feedback. I specifically want the flipper buttons to feel lively when the flippers move, and I have an unorthodox approach in mind for this.

J_K_M_A_N:

--- Quote from: Laythe on August 07, 2020, 11:39:24 pm ---
Next up, though, is force feedback. I specifically want the flipper buttons to feel lively when the flippers move, and I have an unorthodox approach in mind for this.

--- End quote ---

Just when I think it couldn't get any better... I can't believe you are going to give the buttons a little feedback just to get a better feel. That is amazing. So many things I would/could never think of, let alone, execute. :dizzy: :cheers:

J_K_M_A_N

Laythe:
Like many vpins, I'm using various electrical contactors to provide some haptic touch feedback when the various events on the table occur.

The contactors I'm going to use for the flippers have a groove in the base for standard DIN rail base. This groove expects edges that are 35mm apart, and the hooks will grab something at most 0.050" thick.

I have a ton of .060" aluminum, but it won't quite fit in that base. I dug around some more and found the side panels of an old Lian-Li brushed aluminum PC case I'd scavenged because, hey, that's good aluminum. It measured 0.045" thick, which is just about perfect.

I cut some bracket flats on my bandsaw.

My plan is to mount these contactors directly to the flipper buttons, clamped under the button nuts. So, I drilled a hole for a screw and nut to serve as a stop on the end, and a big 1 1/8" hole for the button to pass through. Cleaned up the edges and rounded the corners while I was at it - that's easier while it's flat.

Then I used my finger brake to fold up a bracket.

This is the basic idea, mocked up in a scrap of plywood of the same thickness as the sideskirts.

I figured this would carry the impact from the contactor opening and closing into the area surrounding the button as much as possible. There's still room to connect the terminals to the microswitch and to wire the terminals for the contactor.

Then I tested this setup to see how well it would work, and I discovered... these contactors are different than every single other one I've ever played with.

Most contactors operate towards and away from the DIN rail. I assumed this one did too. IT DOESN'T. This is a -side- firing contactor, the coil moves the contacts parallel to the DIN rail mount, not perpendicular. To quote Q-Bert, "!$#%$@!"

So I took it all apart and put one more bend on the DIN tab, making it a Z-bend, to reorient the contactor to the correct axis. That made a big difference.

Here's the result, under the skirt, looking up at the playfield monitor.

There's about 1/32" of clearance between the monitor and the bracket+contactor assembly below it, but they don't touch. When the contactor fires, the contacts move toward the button, impact together, and that shock bounces down the bracket and makes a very tacticle "thunk" on the flipper button, you can feel it through the plunger. It's not a huge thing, but it makes the machine feel far more alive under your hands. Because it's tied to the software via DOF, and not the microswitch directly, they do nothing if you hit the button while the flipper can't move, such as before coining up and starting, or after game over. Additionally, if something like Addams Family snaps the flippers for you, the contactors fire too.

The extra purple and yellow wires you can see here in this shot will route about a third of the way further up along the skirt, and attach to the slingshot contactor up there. I'm holding off on mounting those slingshot contactors until I get the front skirt axle bracket built, so that I can set all of the remaining 6-32 thread inserts in one batch.

Laythe:
Got the front bracket built.

Here's the blank straight off the waterjet.

The slot on this clamp looks short, but that's because I plan to cut it apart entirely. The other two brackets somewhat like this that form the TV vesa mount tray, are semipermanently attached to the axle - they slide on from the ends, so getting them on or off requires breaking the front and rear cabinets apart. This fellow, however, gets installed while the machine is together, so it is going to become a two part clamp.

I didn't have the waterjet part it yet, because I want the clamp screw holes in both pieces to be lined up, and that's easier done while it's one piece.

Here's the minor diameter holes drilled all the way through. After doing this, I used the bandsaw to cut the clamping block free of the main bar, tapped the holes in the clamping block, and drilled out the holes in the bar to the clearance diameter for 1/4-20 hardware.

Bolted up around a scrap offcut of the axle, to verify the fit and clamping action:

This bar exists to support the front of the side skirts, up near the flipper buttons. I've gotten to the point in this project where I no longer precisely trust the CAD plans, and I want the skirts to fit closely against the sides of the playfield display even though they are not directly attached to it at all. At this point, the cabinet itself is the one definitive set of plans, so I intentionally cut this bracket about an inch long on both ends.

I mounted it up to the machine, sticking out past the playfield display on both sides, then used a square to trace lines off the sides of the display housing perpendicular to the bezel. Traced those lines onto the bar, then took the bar back off the machine.

Also pictured is the .060 aluminum I'll be making the... bracket brackets?... no, let's call them anchor plates, of. The anchor plates allow the plywood skirts to have hidden hardware.

I cut the bar down to .060 shorter than the traced lines, drilled and tapped the ends of the bars for two screws, and made up some simple bar bracket anchor plates. Here they are, near the flipper button region. The outside face of this plate is in a plane flush with the side of the monitor above.

These match the anchor plates I already made on the ends of the counterweight rail, so now I've got two well-separated mounts for the skirts. The plates are a little different between the left and right side, because this monitor has a speaker box only on the "bottom" - now right - that I have to dodge.

(Also, I have some paint touch up work to do on the red, where I've chipped it with my temporary kludge pinball flipper button mockup mounts many months ago.)

Now that all four anchor plates are present, it's time to set all the rest of the 24 count of 6-32 small thread inserts into the insides of the skirts. Positioning matters here, minimal room for error - you can't exactly drift or nudge a thread insert, or at least, not without a whole lot of work. So, I mounted the skirts again by only the rear anchor plates, then traced through to transfer the perimeters and hole locations while holding the skirts parallel with the display where I want them to land.

Here we are with brass inserts for all the 6-32 screws, and the slingshot contactors attached. The forstner-cut relief carvings here are to clear the button heads that attach the anchor plates down; since the anchor plates are only sixty thou thick, I couldn't easily do countersunk hardware there.

Last up, verify these new anchor plates can in fact be screwed down...

I, uh, may have had to egg out a few of these holes in the aluminum plates to make that work. (cough) Nothing to see here, move along.

(All these sharpie layout scribbles will of course be hidden under the two to three layers of primer, and three to six layers of paint, eventually.)

This gets me to another playable point on the machine; now I can play fake pinball with flipper, slingshot and bumper force feedback working, and these parts being correctly mounted and with improved wiring routing means the machine is again transformable for a while.

I have a slight interference rub with the bottom front corner of the left skirt against the front cabinet in the pinball rotation, and with the bottom front corner of the right skirt at the very end of cockpit rotation. Also, amusingly, the clearances have turned out to be so tight that the aft bearing truck on the left side of the control panel's linear rail actually clicks the right flipper button once in passing as it goes by - it's tight enough clearance to push and release the button on the way past, but it doesn't quite bind. Phew.

I've got some more work to do before the last big hardware push, which will be fixing the skirt rubs, smoothing the edges, inletting the fake side rails into the plywood side skirts, then putting a good smooth polished red paintjob on the plywood, touch up paint in a few other places, and... man, it's getting close to just being Done. Two years in, that's a weird feeling, for it to be approaching Done.

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