Making myself a spinner: does anyone have other ideas ?

[Mamezilla]

Hello everyone,

Since the budget on my control panel is down low and I want to improve it a bit, i would like to make myself a spinner.  However, a lot of the links about that subject in the "controls" section of BYOAC are broken.  I have seen both the Cheep, Twisty Grip and ArcadeStupidity plans, but all of them seems to need parts and pieces not available where I live in Canada.

I have also seen at http://lillypad.4mg.com/lillypad/spinner.html the hacking of an old Microsoft serial mouse, I have found a used one of those, but all the serial ports on the computer are currently used (one for the Crayola trackball and the other for my ham radio TNC (packet and APRS).  So unless I find a way to hack the mouse encoder of it and put it in another mouse (either ps/2 or USB), I wont be able to go with it.  

The less complicated way for me would be to get a spinner from Oscar, but the last time I ordered parts from the US have costed me the double in canadian currency, with the exchange rate and the fact that UPS charged me almost $42.00 canadian for customs.  That order was from Happs, before I found out they had distributors in Canada...      By the way, does Oscar and TheRealBobRoberts have distributors over here ?

Thanks

[Xphile]

<snip>
the hacking of an old Microsoft serial mouse, I have found a used one of those, but all the serial ports on the computer are currently used (one for the Crayola trackball and the other for my ham radio TNC (packet and APRS).  So unless I find a way to hack the mouse encoder of it and put it in another mouse (either ps/2 or USB), I wont be able to go with it.  

you can just use a $2.99 two button (cicero?) ps/2 mouse from futre shop for the hard drive spinner hack..works great! :-)

[eightbit]

Hey BBR is this what your looking for? http://www.doughansen.net/arcade/spinner.htm
The hard drive bearing is one way to do it. I've also seen in line skate wheels used for the bearing.

[Warborg]

Hey BBR is this what your looking for?  I've also seen in line skate wheels used for the bearing.

The inline skate Spinner was mine...  

I'm just happy to be quoted as an example!!  

[1Spoon]

Since the budget on my control panel is down low and I want to improve it a bit, i would like to make myself a spinner.  

I

[dhansen]

Wooo hooo the Hard Drive Spinner rides again!

 

Doug

[1Spoon]

Wooo hooo the Hard Drive Spinner rides again!

 

Doug

Sure does..  
So much more fun than buying the stuff.
But seriously dhansen - how did it happen?
"-Hmm.. somewhere deep inside my harddrive there must be a great arcadespinner.. I

[eightbit]

"-Hmm.. somewhere deep inside my harddrive there must be a great arcadespinner.. I

[Mamezilla]

Since the budget on my control panel is down low and I want to improve it a bit, i would like to make myself a spinner.  

I

[eightbit]

The plastic  sleeve allows you to convert the spinner knob to a bolt that threads into the hard drive bearing.

The inline skate bearing is the same idea as the hard drive spinner hack. You just use a skate wheel instead of the hard drive bearing. It requires that you find a shaft to fit which shouldn't be to hard you should be able to use a skate axle with little modification. Thats the route that I want to try.

[Warborg]

Since the budget on my control panel is down low and I want to improve it a bit, i would like to make myself a spinner.  

I

[x-wing]

Actually, the inline skate wheel spinner was my brainchild...  

Not to pee on your parade, but I remember seeing an inline skate wheel spinner here years ago on the BYOAC message boards.  It's just been recently "rediscovered", that's all.  

[Mamezilla]

Actually, the inline skate wheel spinner was my brainchild...  
Check this thread:

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=3688;start=0

If you want to give it a shot and have any questions, feel free to ask...

Looks like I didn't search hard enough....  Thanks for the link   !

[Warborg]

Actually, the inline skate wheel spinner was my brainchild...  

Not to pee on your parade, but I remember seeing an inline skate wheel spinner here years ago on the BYOAC message boards.  It's just been recently "rediscovered", that's all.  

Interesting, never saw anything on it...  And appearantly no one else either...  

[x-wing]

Interesting, never saw anything on it...  And appearantly no one else either...  

Not surprising, you're too new to have seen it.  So is the majority of the group here these days.  I can count on one hand any familiar names still around from the old days.  

Even these young'uns with the 1000+ posts behind their names are just wee children compared to some of us old timers.  

[Warborg]

Interesting, never saw anything on it...  And appearantly no one else either...  

Not surprising, you're too new to have seen it.  So is the majority of the group here these days.  I can count on one hand any familiar names still around from the old days.  

Even these young'uns with the 1000+ posts behind their names are just wee children compared to some of us old timers.  

Can I get you a walker and some Geritol?  Maybe some Ensure?  

[Mike]

Since the budget on my control panel is down low and I want to improve it a bit, i would like to make myself a spinner.  

I

[eightbit]

Can I get you a walker and some Geritol?  Maybe some Ensure?  

Now, now... respect your elders... They are going to die soon....  

[Mamezilla]

Can I get you a walker and some Geritol?  Maybe some Ensure?  

Now, now... respect your elders... They are going to die soon....  

LMAO !!!!

BTW, could not check for those spacers, we had a snowstorm today, almost a foot of snow.  As for the Sears harware place, there are none of these over here too   .   We have a couple of Sears stores, but not those that are specialised in hardware.  My safest bet should be Home Depot, or Rona (another local here).

[x-wing]

Can I get you a walker and some Geritol?  Maybe some Ensure?  

Now, now... respect your elders... They are going to die soon....  

LMAO !!!!

Hmmm, I didn't realize that 32 was on the high side of the arcade/mame crowd!  I was obviously speaking figuratively, not literally when I was saying "young'uns" and all.  I just happened to come about the mame cab scene a few years earlier than most of you, that's all, ain't no big thang!

I guess Warborg got upset about being told his idea wasn't original.  Don't take it to heart, chief, it's not the first recycled idea to come across here.  If it makes you feel any better, we can all start calling a skate bearing spinner your "brainchild" if you like.  

[Mamezilla]

Hmmm, I didn't realize that 32 was on the high side of the arcade/mame crowd!  

OK then, you can call me Grandpa...  I'm 38....

[Kitbasher]

Bit of advice on building the hard drive spinner.  Dont bother with the mouse's encoder wheel.  All mine did was jitter.  I cut out every other spoke and still it just jittered.  Then I had a brainstorm and used an image of one of Oscar's encoders wheels, increased the contrast in photoshop and printed it on a sheet of transparancy film.  It worked ok, but the picture of the encoder wheel was not perfectly round, so I then drew a new encoder wheel in photoshop.  I was so proud of my "original" idea until I saw this in the downloads\utilities section of BYOAC : EncoderPrinter -- A utility by John Dickson that prints encoder disks for spinners.

That would have been too easy.  

[Warborg]

Can I get you a walker and some Geritol?  Maybe some Ensure?  

Now, now... respect your elders... They are going to die soon....  

LMAO !!!!

Hmmm, I didn't realize that 32 was on the high side of the arcade/mame crowd!  I was obviously speaking figuratively, not literally when I was saying "young'uns" and all.  I just happened to come about the mame cab scene a few years earlier than most of you, that's all, ain't no big thang!

I guess Warborg got upset about being told his idea wasn't original.  Don't take it to heart, chief, it's not the first recycled idea to come across here.  If it makes you feel any better, we can all start calling a skate bearing spinner your "brainchild" if you like.  

Nah, not upset...  Just seemed like the right time to tease you about your phrasing...  

Well, I can still feel proud of my design for the fact that as far as I knew it was original, and I came up with it without prior knowledge...  

I also built a spinner from the hard drive motor originally, but to be honest it just didn't have the same action that "my" design has, and was actually a little more difficult to construct (except for the soldering for the remote optics, not that it was terribly difficult, just a bit more work then the rest).

[Mamezilla]

I finally was able to find some plastic tubing for the shaft in the plumbing section of an hardware store.  The only thing missing is the mouse I will be hacking.  I have a few serial mouses, but want to hack a PS/2 one.

Thanks Kitbasher for the suggestion about the EncoderPrinter utility.  I've downloaded it and will check it out.

And thank you everybody who posted replies, tips and suggestions to both of my recent posts.  You guys are simply AWESOME.

[BeBoxer]

Bit of advice on building the hard drive spinner.  Dont bother with the mouse's encoder wheel.  All mine did was jitter.  I cut out every other spoke and still it just jittered.  Then I had a brainstorm and used an image of one of Oscar's encoders wheels, increased the contrast in photoshop and printed it on a sheet of transparancy film.  It worked ok, but the picture of the encoder wheel was not perfectly round, so I then drew a new encoder wheel in photoshop.  I was so proud of my "original" idea until I saw this in the downloads\utilities section of BYOAC : EncoderPrinter -- A utility by John Dickson that prints encoder disks for spinners.

That would have been too easy.  

From what I can tell with my experiments, there is a strong interaction between the spacing of the slots on the disk and the spacing of the detectors. Which makes sense really if you think about it. I found this by trying to print a new encoder wheel to use with some cheap mouse electronics. The first wheel I tried didn't register any movement at all. I found that certain spacings worked fine, some were jerky, and others simply didn't work.

Something that should be added to the Downloads section is David Lehn's similar utility. Rather than being a Windows program, it's actually just a Postscript file. A fairly clever way of handling this actually, but as a geek I've always had an afffection for hand-written Postscript programs. I used it to print out a whole page of various strips using different slot spacings. Easier to cut out compared to disks. Then I just manually ran the various strips back and forth in the detector to find the spacing which seemed to provide the best movement.

Anyway, if you want to check out the Postscript utility, it's at http://crib.lehn.org:8080/~dlehn/projects/hardware/optenc/. It's GPL'd, so mirroring it on arcadecontrols.com should be a non-issue.

[Mamezilla]

A little update on this topic:

Since I'm on a budget, I have decided to use the most parts I already own to make my spinner.  So I tried a mix of both the hard drive bearing hack and the old style Microsoft mouse hack (like on this site:  http://lillypad.4mg.com/lillypad/spinner.html.  I drilled a hole in the center of the bearing and inserted the old style Microsoft mouse encoder shaft in it.  I glued the thing with epoxy and tried it yesterday after 24 hours of drying:  I played Tron a couple of time and the spinner worked like a charm ! until the epoxy broke and and encoder wheel went off the bearing....   Oh well, at least I had my 10 minutes of glory  

I removed all traces of epoxy and glued the darn thing back again, this time with construction grade glue, which I was told was harder and tougher than epoxy by an expert at my local hardware store.  I'll see.  The darn thing broke probably because I noticed the mouse encoder is "wobbling" a little when I turn the spinner, and I have put something too hard to prevent it from turning when I spun the wheel.

Any comments and / or suggestions would be appreciated.

[dhansen]

Bit of advice on building the hard drive spinner.  Dont bother with the mouse's encoder wheel.  All mine did was jitter.  I cut out every other spoke and still it just jittered

I've never seen the jittering you are referring to, I used a Belkin mouse, original encoder wheel, and Oscars Logitech drivers in DOS and it is as smooth as silk.  Perhaps windows mouse acceleration was turned on (if you are using it in windows).

Doug