A Mame machine in an antique buffet - USB probs solved (I think!)

[emphatic]

Very awesome. 

[yotsuya]

Tell me that voltage switch on the left hand side really works...!

[drventure]

Thanks for the comments!

@Yotsuya: It doesn't work quite yet, but it IS all wired up. It'll be the power switch for the cab once I've got it wired into the PC's power button. That great big 2000amp ammeter works too, I just scaled it down a bit and converted it to a voltmeter so that it reads the voltage set for one of the outputs of the LEDWiz. Eventually, I plan to write a little service that monitors the CPU utilization and drives that LEDWiz output from 0-5v based on the actual CPU utilization.

The barometer works, but it's just a barometer 

[Donkbaca]

You need to build an inter-web access module (a pc) to go next to it and build one of these to use it:  http://www.instructables.com/id/Buccaneer-Keyboard/

[drventure]

That keyboard is great! Wow. handcutting and polishing all that brass tubing for those keys. Ouch...

That project might have a wait a bit though 

I'm feeling a vpin or a driving cab in my future once I'm done with this....

[Nephasth]

A steam punk driving cab?

[Donkbaca]

Is there a steampunk themed pinball machine?

[Ryglore]

Is there a steampunk themed pinball machine?

I would LOVE to have/build a Steampunk pinball machine. Maybe build it out of an Old-Old pinball, you know before dot matrix scoreboards. 

[drventure]

Found this. Not sure it's my style, but, it's.... interesting




Also found this vid of a work in progress.

[Ryglore]

That 1st one just looks all kinds of flimsy.

[TopJimmyCooks]

steampunk with space opera theme. 




http://www.jeffdeboer.com/Galleries/SpaceStuff/tabid/69/moduleid/413/viewkey/photo/photoid/434/Default.aspx

was just on the make magazine blog. 

[Nephasth]

The spikes around the porthole window are parts of a tractor's sickle. I've got a couple old rusty tractor sickles in my garage that I was thinking of turning into iron shark jaws.

Sorry for straying off topic...

[drventure]

Nice stuff. I picked up some tractor gears at one point, but they turned out a little too big for the buffet project.

I'm thinking they might work with a lamp project I'm toying with...

I love that portal window, though!

[drventure]

I wrote about this a while back, had no idea what was going on, and it was quite annoying. Essentially, for the longest time, I've had very strange issues with my USB devices. They'd act as though they'd been unplugged, or would just start acting wonky (my U360s would just freeze up, then a half second later, unfreeze, etc).

The troublesome part was it didn't seem to be limited to a particular hub, or particular devices. I thought at first I was overdriving the USB power with my LEDwiz's (i've got 3), But I double checked all them, and switched them all over to external power, and still had probs.

I decided yesterday, I'd had it. If I couldn't get things stable, this project wasn't going to be too popular with anyone around here.

So I started swapping and testing, swapping and testing.

I also rearranged how I was connecting hubs and devices, based on some info I picked up recently.

Namely:

1) All USB hubs, apparently are 4 port hubs. If you have a 7 port hub, it's just 2-4port hubs that are internally connected, hence you loose one of the ports, thus 7 ports.
2) if you have a 10 port hub, it's just 3 hubs, with one hub connected to the upstream side, and 2 other hubs connected to that hub. hence you loose 2 of your 12 ports, thus 10 ports.
3) It's better to keep the hub nesting depth as low as possible. So, if you have 3-7 or 10 port hubs, you're best off connecting them to another 4 port hub and connecting IT to upstream (ie to the PC). This is because if you use one of the 7 or 10 port hubs, there's no way to tell whether you port your connecting to is the "root" internal hub or a spoke hub, so you could end up nesting 1 or more levels deeper than what you really need to.
4) make sure that you use powered hubs for any 7 or more port hubs, and that the PS is roughly 500ma*#ports, so, for a 7 port hub, you'd want a roughly 3.5amp PS.

and finally
5) don't use cheap-ass hubs

I picked this one up at Radio Shack (it's one of those fancy hubs with a ton of blinking LED's in it), it ended up being the primary source of my problems all along.


Here's hoping my USB issues are finally laid to rest!

[amendonz]

saw this and immediately thought of you 

http://shoryuken.com/forum/index.php?threads/check-out-my-new-arcade-stick.75228/page-419#post-5838820

(hope you don't mind these sorts of posts too much)

[drventure]

Don't mind posts like that at all!

Copper tubing for wire guides 

Wow. And I love what he did with the ball top joystick handle. Looks like watch guts cast in acrylic.

Nice!

[Rick]

Copper tubing for wire guides 

Do I take the emot to say you wish you'd thought of that?  Actually, you've given me a thought...

I spent my weekend clearing out my two sheds that were PACKED to capacity - seriously, I could pretty much just throw things onto others from the door - and cleaned out my Dad's old tools that I wasn't using.  I know that he has one or more hand-held tools for bending thin copper pipe.  Would you like them?  I'd be happy to send them your way, since you're obviously the man who would be able to use them.

Let me know.  If you need a pic, I can snap one up tonight.

[drventure]

@Rick, you read the emoticon right. If I was doing a clear cased build, that idea would be high up on my list.

Thanks for the offer. I've got a small(ish) bender a picked up a while back.

It looks exactly like this



It only works with small stock, but the main issue I have with it is I can't do particularly tight bends.

I'd definitely be interested in what you've got though, esp if it might do bends tighter than about a 2 inch radius (which is what the one above can do).

I'd be happy to cover shipping and something for your trouble.

Thanks!

[smalltownguy]

BUMP!! Anything new on this??

 

[BadMouth]

BUMP!! Anything new on this??

 

Last time is was switched on, it disappeared through some kind of portal.

[drventure]

BUMP!! Anything new on this??
 

Last time is was switched on, it disappeared through some kind of portal.

Not so much a portal as an iris



 

(that's not mine by the way, but damn, I wish I could build one of those... Another project.)

Actually, Since I finished up my antique radio->touchscreen jukebox project, I've been slowly making my way back to the buffet.

But it's playable, so that's been a tad of the kiss of death as far as project time goes with it 

Still, my main target now is to get the screen rotating ala grandfather clock pulleys and brass cable.

I did finally get my volume control worked out though.

I found a very nice app called 3rvx, which, along with a short autohotkey script lets me use my spinner, while holding down a specific button, to adjust volume very easily, with the added benefits of
1) forcing the volume to a predefined "normal" on boot
2) visuallizing the setting via 3rvx (which is completely and easily skinnable)

[drventure]

Wow. Ok, been a few months since I had any time to work on the buffet, but I'm slowly getting back to it.

There's been a few threads concerning the wiimote that I've been watching recently, so I decided to take another stab at getting it working.

This time around, I've actually had a little success.

Here's the wiimote pairing details I've come up with so far.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,122286.msg1297956.html#msg1297956

One minor issue that I'm not sure I can do much about is that my custom made IR transmitter bar inadvertently appears to narrow the ir illumination a tad.



The end result is that it +seems+ like the Wiimote camera's field of view is fairly limited.

However, I've never played a real wii, so it's tough to tell. Once I get power wired permanently to the IR Bar and experiment more with glovepie converted Wiimote to mouse (or whatever it does to connect wiimote data to mame), I should know more.


Finally, I've just about got a circuit put together to allow me to use this



To actually power up (or power off) the cabinet.

Believe it or not, I started +that+ little side project back in 2009. Ugh. The first round kind of worked, but had issues.

But I believe all those are solved.

Many thanks to DaOldMan for helping me sort a few of the finer EE points out. I'll be posting a schematic once I actually get it all hooked up.

[thatpurplestuff]

Coolest arcade power switch ever?  Haha love the look of that thing... glad to see you're staying busy!

[drventure]

@thatpurplestuff

Thanks. It's nice to get a few minutes to get back on this build. I've actually been doing a little software config as well (led animations, slight Mala theme changes, speeding up boot time, etc) but none of that's interesting enough to post, I suspect. 

[monkeychunkuk]

This machine is amazing

[kahlid74]

Looking great!  Love the vibe you're going for.

[Ryglore]

Killer power switch DV, man I wish I could see this thing in person. You'll need to do some extensive video logging of it all in action whenever it is finally done.

[drventure]

Thanks guys.

Yeah, this might be another of those decade long PixelHugger type projects, but it's coming along slowly.

I've just about got the kinks worked out of the power on switch. Then I'll just wire it up on a proto board and put it in a case somewhere.

I'm getting antsy to start in on the rotating monitor now....

[drventure]

Well, a little cleanup and imaging work on this cabinet

I've written about the effort on this thread

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,122896.msg1309441.html#msg1309441

But in a nutshell, I took all 3400 cabinet images that I've been able to collect from all over, and cleaned them all up so that they're all chromakeyed on pure black.

That way, Mala's transparency works properly with them all now! Yeah, i know. It was a ridiculous amount of work for such a small effect.

But hey, maybe that can be my little contribution to the effort!

So what do they look like?

I grabbed shots from my Mala layout of a few before and after and attached below.

[Le Chuck]

Your fortitude in this herculean task is commendable.  The results are worthwhile.  Too speak plainly this build continually ---smurfing--- rocks.   

[Ryglore]

Oh, that's killer! I agree with Le Chuck, I would never have the patience to knock that job out.

 

[TopJimmyCooks]

The 20 minute job to:

A. learn how to batch resize in PS and
B. batch resize all the CP images to use in Mala

nearly derailed me. 

Congratulations.  Now I don't feel so bad about spending 3 hours cleaning up Itunes a few weeks back.   Possibly making the background behind the images closer to black could make examples like bermuda triangle look more natural? 

[drventure]

Possibly making the background behind the images closer to black could make examples like bermuda triangle look more natural?

Yeah, That's what I'm thinking too. I like my layout in general but there are a few tweaks I think could really help.

Oh, that's killer! I agree with Le Chuck, I would never have the patience to knock that job out.

Thanks. I'd been mulling this over for several years, but I just could never muster up the oomph to just do it. I started messing around in Firefox one morning and realized you can perform a set of actions, save them, and then assign to a hotkey. That got me over the edge. I defined about a half dozen hotkeys and that made things significantly faster, while still allowing me to inspect each image.

Your fortitude in this herculean task is commendable.  The results are worthwhile.  Too speak plainly this build continually ---smurfing--- rocks.   

Thanks, Le Chuck. I was really hesitant too, because it just seemed like +someone+ must have already done something like this. I never heard back from Pregretto, though (whose collection and that of Mr. Do's is what all this is based on, BTW) so I could only assume he never had. I figured if Circo was charging for the downloads, he might  have, but I didn't hear back from him either. So, here we are. I may well have just replicated someone else's work, but I'll be damned if I could find an example.

[monkeychunkuk]

Any update on this epic project?

[yotsuya]

This project is on hiatus.

[drventure]

Thanks yotsuya.

Yeah, it's still around, just not something I can work on right at the moment.

In the meantime, I hope to take on a few software bits that I've been meaning to get to, but hadn't been able to.

@yotsuya
BTW, you had any issues with the cabinet images? I hope they're working out.

[yotsuya]

Dr, I'm redoing my MAME Cab front end in a few weeks, and I'm going to incorporate them. I'll let you know how they work out. Thanks again!

[thatpurplestuff]

Hope everything is alright and that you can resume work on your build sooner rather than later.