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Green Machine (Pics added 7 18 2006)

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Cameronj:
Announcing my Green Machine bartop Project.


That is the simple Marquee for it.
This will be my 4th big emulation project.
This post will serve as my simple construction log

Goals for Phase one:
- Needs to weigh less than 60 lbs for occasional transport.
- Construction with T-Stick Plus and minipac controller
- Addition of a small arcade Suzu Trackball (with electric Ice LED upgrade)
- Run by external Brain (Mac Mini Dual Core Windows)
- Clean as possible external wiring.
- Full LED Wiz integration
- LCD 17"1280x1024 horizontal display with custom bezel (yeah I tried it with a 15"monitor and liked the LCD better in all regards)
- Internal sound ported through front (external subwoofer.)
- External volume control (a must)
- Backlit marquee
- External rear push buttons for monitor control
- Single power plug for all internal cabinet parts
- Various lit buttons
- Green T-molding and theme (obvious)
- Internal USB switch
- All buttons except for rear monitor buttons backlit
- Side buttons for pinball
- green chase lights on the top of the cabinet
- Four main controller buttons and trackball use RGB LEDS
- All other LEDs green

Phase II Items
- Putting on cabinet feet
- Underlighting cabinet
- Modular 2nd Player external control panel
- Analog stick and spinner addition to external control panel
- Rear cabinet green glow effect
- Mac Mini Green lighting effects
- Networking setup for multiplayer on my other machine
- Write theme song for cabinet  ;D


Phase III Items
- Integration with my programmable talking fish project (Smart Bass Project)
- Integration with my Robosapien V2
- Simple green laser scanning show on ceiling projected from cabinet

Undetermined stuff
- Front End (loved MameWah before)
- Other emulators than mame and visual pinball(daphne etc)
- Don't know what I am going to do with the back of the cabinet


Well let me know what you think. I will be posting more pics in a minute of current progress...

Cameronj:
OK I started going full steam on this project about a week ago. Several things of note. I bought a bartop cabinet about 6 months ago from mr bubbles. I don't see him around much. It is a nice design and I like it. It was damaged in shipping, but I have fixed most issues by now.

I hope to have all Phase I items completed in the next 3-4 weeks. We will see how that goes.

Things I have done so far:
-Repaired the broken parts of the cabinet
-Painted the parts of the cabinet that need to be painted
- Cut 90 percent of the holes needed in the cabinet
- created the top plate with the chase light leds and have started the wiring for those
- purchased pretty much everything that I need for the cabinet
- tested the minipac and the ledwiz controllers
-designed the CP
-designed the artwork for the marquee, top, sides CP, and front under CP
-installed cable in LCD monitor for remote switching

Short term things that I plan on doing in the next week
-Finish cutting holes
-Mount controls
-Mount Artwork and Marquee
-Install all LEDs
-Purchase Mac Mini
-Install bezel on LCD
-Install LCD and Speakers in cabinet
-install micropac in cabinet
-install ledwiz in cabinet
-install usb hub in cabinet
-install powerstrip in cabinet
-install power supply for Leds in cabinet
-isntall t-molding

Here are some more pics:
Cabinet in current state:


Top plate with LEDs installed for chase lighting (need to buff out scrathes in laminate. :(


Top Plate backside initial wiring all resistors attached:

DigDreams:
Wow - you have alot of wiring to do, but it should look great.  You are going to be the first person who needs to make a video to show his lighting! 

I have a question about your terminal blocks - I have not used this type before.  Do these come pre-jumpered or do you have to jumper them together with wire?  Also, are you daisy-chaining the grounds on the chase lights or running seperate ground wires to each?

- DigDreams

Cameronj:
Yeah a ton of wiring to do. I do plan on doing a video when the lighting is up and operational. Those european style terminal blocks need to be jumpered together. For the chase lights on the top, I plan on only using 3 LED Wiz ports out of the 32 available. Therefore there will be a lot of bunching together. I will probably need to add one more terminal strip inside the cab to fit all of the wires. I am happy that I bought the preconfigured and wired RGB LEDs from GGG as they are an elegant solution to what would be a real mess with the buttons that are RGB.

With my current plans, I will be using the following amount of LED Wiz ports:
RBG Buttons: 12
RGG Trackball: 3
Backlit Buttons: 11
Chase Lights on top: 3

Total ports used: 29

I am glad that I have a couple left for other things.

theCoder:
Sounds like you'll get this done quickly.  It looks like you're well on your way.

I take it the RGB buttons can be configured to change colors?  Under what conditions will they change?

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