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Party-Box...Countertop cab w/ laptop & flat screen
GadgetGeek:
Amazing work. Looks great. And great job documenting the process. Thanks for sharing!
Timoe:
WOW - that came out really well. I need to see a full frontal shot. :o
theCoder:
Lighting the Trackball
I've seen a lot of people that have come up with fancy LED mounts for the bottom of trackballs. Rather than mess with a fixture to hold the LED's then figuring out how to mount the fixture to the trackball, I decided to just drill three holes into the bottom of the trackball and glue the LED's in place. There is plenty of room between the ball and the bottom of the housing. I slipped a thick shim of scrap plastic through the hole, under where I was drilling to keep me from damaging the ball. It works like a champ.
Control Panel Wiring & Lites
It was a long night last night wiring things up. Here is the standard shot of my wiring job.
I've heard other people mention it, and now I truly understand, it is hard to photograph LED lit buttons and trackballs. This shot was taken with a flash. The colors and brightness are flattened out. In real life they look much more distinctive than this.
This shot was taken without a flash. Obviously it is not this bright in real life. Notice the small black admin buttons on the right side of the panel. They turned out nice.
Things are very cramped inside now with the pinball buttons, control panel, IPac and trackball cables, etc. etc. etc. Tonight I put it all together and tested my wiring. I found a few problems. One I've tracked down to a shorted switch, which I proceeded to destroy while removing the hotglue around it. Lesson learned...test all your wiring before assembly. It took at least 30 minutes to get the control panel on (LED wiring, adjusting leaf switches, moving wires around, dropping screws, etc.) It took another 5 minutes to get the control panel off to debug the wiring. It's getting late and I'm tired and frustrated. I'm probably better off letting it sit over night or else I may trash something else.
theCoder:
Hardware Mostly Complete
Yesterday I did some additional work on debugging wiring problems. I tracked the main problem down to a bad Ipac-4 board. It is either bad physically, or I've got the wrong version of the configuration software or something. I'm working with Andy at UltiMark to figure out what is going on.
In the mean time, I put the t-molding on. Given the blue highlights around the perimeter, I'm considering leaving off the side art. Comments?
I've getting so close I can smell it. I've just got to load up my menuing software (going with Mamewah), load up my various games, configure the menus, do a custom Mamewah skin, and get the wiring/IPac "fixed". Here are some shots of the project in its near-complete stage.
leapinlew:
awesome dude. Just awesome.
Couple quick questions and a comment.
The trackball - which model did you go with? I would love to flush mount mine, but I didn't go with a high lip model. Is yours a high lip?
My comment is on the sideart. I think sideart would make it too busy. You've built a machine that makes a statement in design. Let the design be the art. Take the side profile of your machine for example. It's uniquely shaped and thin. If you add art, you'll add dimension that may not showoff the thin characteristics that I believe make the machine so nice looking. It's just my opinion, but I subscribe to the less is more philosophy.
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