COBeav, I found your page through Wiring page, and thought the idea was so cool, that I just had to do something like it. I didn't use a wall socket junction box like you did, although when I help my friend do the same thing for his cabinet, I will, just to make it easier.
I bought a new power strip especially for the project, but it turned out not to have an easy method for disassembly, short of cracking the case, so I swapped it out with an older power strip that I had, which had screws in the bottom. After opening it up, I cut out the filtering circuitry but left the circuit breaker in place. I needed the extra room, and it wouldn't have been easy to keep the filter in place with what I had in mind.
My strip had a center bus bar for the ground (green) wire, and two bus bars, one along either side, for the white and black wires. I pulled out the power and neutral bus bars (leaving the center ground strip alone) and cut a section out of the center of each so that I essentially had four pieces, two per side, with three sockets powered by each. I then soldered the main plug wires to the first set of two bus bars, and then soldered another set of wires (14-gauge) onto the end of the bars, and passed them out of the housing of the power strip.
The remaining two bus bars also got a wire soldered to each, so I now had two seperate sets of 3 sockets, 3 always on, and 3 "switched" by the PC power link. I was going to solder the wires to the Radio Shack relay like you did, but found the socket for the relay while I was digging through their parts drawers. In the end, I ended up not using the socket and not soldering. I used high quality insulated female disconnect terminals (14-gauge) and simply crimped the wire ends into the terminals. I'd had enough soldering for one day after completing the bus bars.
With my crimping pliers, I crushed down the tabs in the terminals slightly to get a tighter fit, and pushed them onto the relay tabs. They fit perfectly, are a tight fit, and aren't even all that easy to pull back off, so I had no worries about them coming back off, especially since I intended to enclose the relay before I was finished.
After finishing the wiring from the power strip to the relay, and hooking up the coil terminals of the relay to the 12V wires of an extra hard drive power harness with a ~4 foot extension, I started working on a plastic project box that I bought at Radio Shack also. I drilled a couple half inch holes, one in each end, and used a 3/8" (ID) rubber grommet to protect the wires, which I passed through. The power wires from the power strip went through one end and the 12V switch wiring went out the other. I then trimmed the top so that it would clear the rubber grommets (some interior trimming was necessary also) and drilled some ventilation holes in the top. I protected the wires going into the power strip and to the hard drive power plug with black plastic wire "flex-loom", installed the relay in the project box, and screwed the top on.
While all of the previous modifications were going on, I tested for continuity and impedance at each step to make sure that I wasn't buttoning up something that I'd have to open up again. After I was finished, I plugged the strip into the wall and tested the first three plugs with a multimeter. All were live, as planned. I then plugged the hard drive harness into one of my machines and powered it up, and the other three came on.
The power strip is now mounted inside the cabinet, with its power cable coming out the back of the cabinet using the same retaining brackets the original power cable used. I plugged the cabinet power cable and the Altec Lansing sub/speaker power converter into the switched terminals, and my AdvMAME PC into the first of the "always on" plugs.
I then drilled a couple 1 1/6" holes in the top of the cabinet (a Taito Egret II 29" JAMMA cabinet) and installed one red button for power and one white button for reset. I used a set of jumper wires from an old PC case to connect to the ends of the wiring for the two buttons, and plugged them onto the jumper pins on the motherboard of my PC.
So now the PC powers up when you hit the red button, turns on the monitor, light, and sound system automatically, and then goes into its routine, which includes playing an mpeg startup movie (from the Arcade 84 site... who says that Windows MAME users get to have all the fun?) and then straight into AdvanceMenu. AdvanceMAME has an OFF.COM utility that will power down most ATX motherboards, but I may not use that since I plan to run jukebox software on the same PC. So now upon exiting AdvanceMenu, I just hit the cabinet power button and everything powers down like a fully integrated package. Cool.
I took some pictures, but haven't bothered to download them off the camera yet, and it doesn't look like you can attach pictures on this messageboard, so I'd have to upload them first. Maybe in the next day or so.
Anyway, thanks for the idea and for putting up such an informative how-to page!
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Topic: How To Power Your MAME Cabinet Web Page (Read 10446 times)
