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That's How I Roll! (Skeeball build)
thatpurplestuff:
Started trying some ideas for the new rings... I wanted to come up with a way to have the finished side of the wall base on both sides so that it is easier to clean. The back sides of the wall base on my original rings collect quite a bit of dirt and dust and they are very difficult to clean due to the textured side that the adhesive is supposed to stick to. You can see that not only is it a matte textured finish, it also has little ridges that run along the length of it to help it stick to walls.
So... I messed around with some test pieces to try to actually have the finished side on the inside and outside. Not only did I discover that my riveter no longer pops rivets correctly, I also determined that all of my ideas were garbage. I'll save you the details, but I bought a new riveter and here's a picture of my test Frankenring below.
The self-stick adhesive on this new wall base was way stickier than I anticipated, and actually made working with it pretty difficult because as soon as it touched another part of the ring it was STUCK until I ended up pulling it so hard that the adhesive just came off............ and that, after hours of trying to come up with ideas to have a clean finish on both sides of the ring, is when I realized that underneath the self-stick adhesive is a smooth finish! The back of the wall base feels just as smooth as the front!
I spent hours rolling little glue turds off of the back of the wall base, and this is absolutely going to work perfectly if I just use the same wrapping technique that I did on the initial rings. I also noticed that this new base is just slightly thinner, so instead of doubling up the vinyl to achieve the required 1/4" ring thickness I actually had to wrap it 3x. This ends up being great, because although it uses more vinyl and is therefore more expensive, it also seems to give a bit more stability to the ring shape while at the same time giving me a nice little gap to fit the black tubing into. The black tubing is pretty secure just from the ring pinching it in place, but I think a bit of adhesive will make sure that it doesn't move at all. See below!
This is still just a test ring and I haven't cut a black piece to fit it exactly, but it definitely works to show the look I am going for on the rest of the rings. I love the white rivets and the black tops should really help the rings pop against the playfield.
I also blew up a dimmer switch trying to wire up some new LED lights that shine down on the playfield... I'll definitely need some advice getting those working when I get to that point. More later!
thatpurplestuff:
Some quick updates... got some parts painted and drying and got the plug-in dimmer setup working.
Speaker grills
Speaker frames
Light frames
After frying up my first dimmer switch by being an idiot, I have finally gotten the LED lights dimming and ready to install in the machine (just waiting for the paint to set on the frames). These new lights are fantastic for a few reasons... their profile is significantly smaller than the old incandescent lights, the range of brightness is much wider, and the lights themselves actually have 3 toggle settings for warm white, neutral white, and cool white. These are meant to be hardwired into a house but I've wired them to the dimmer and configured it to plug into an outlet... I tried snapping a few pictures but my phone didn't do the various brightness levels justice, so I'm just showing them off and on.
I've also given up on using the NEON RGB LED strip for the ramp... although not advertised as such, I believe it is an individually addressable strip which will not play well with how I am wiring them up. I've fried a section of it (noticing a pattern here?) while testing by being an idiot (notice another pattern?) and letting one of the leads graze our metal dishwasher handle. Sparks and angry wife followed. I loved the look of the "NEON" LED strip but I'll have to save it the non-fried section for another project.
I cut open the NEON strip to look at the individual LEDs
I fried a section and zapped a divot out of my dishwasher :o
I went ahead and purchased a standard 5050 RGB LED strip and RGB amplifier and had some successful tests running them with the LEDwiz, so the ramp lighting will now be controlled via my software as opposed to manually with the RGB remote (this gives me a lot of fun ideas to incorporate lane color in each game). Waiting for the LED diffuser channels to arrive in the mail before I begin prepping the strips for final installation. I've also decided to use small 4" long segments of the LED strip to light up the individual holes as opposed to having single RGBdrive LEDs... should be a brighter and cheaper solution as long as I figured out a way to mount them that will avoid impact from Skeeballs.
Diffuser channel
I'm purposely working to wrap up this machine in small bites and not getting anything playable until it is 100% done... I've found that the "as soon as it is playable, all progress stops" rule that applies to arcade cabinets also applies to Skeeball machines. Will post more later!
thatpurplestuff:
First off, I'm embarrassed to post how much time and money I wasted on an absolute disaster of a bumper solution. I was going to post pics but it's too heartbreaking... spent over $100 on wood and 1/8" rubber strips and without going into details, let's just say that it smelled like old cigarettes, it was lumpy, and it was falling apart before I even mounted it (insert joke about ex-wives or something here). It was seriously a slow motion week-long disaster.
Good news is I've settled on a much better and actually cheaper solution... it's this vinyl bumper below but in black. It ended up being almost exactly $100 after shipping.
https://wallguard.com/wallguards-crash-rails/cart-wall-and-equipment-protection/vinyl-bumper-2257.html
REALLY wish I had found this premade solution from the get-go. Just got it in the mail yesterday and it's exactly what I was hoping for... once I figure out the best way to mount it I'll snap some pictures.
thatpurplestuff:
I NEED SOME HELPFUL IDEAS!!
So I've never been happy with my net solution... technically it mostly works but it looks very amateurish and it just doesn't match with the look I'm going for. My idea as of a few weeks ago was to have clear plexi suspended in the frame, but as I've thought about it I really want it to look like a net. What I've decided on is to use plexi but have it be edge lit with a net pattern etched into it, so I can use my software to have the net be as subtle or as colorful as I want (and maybe integrate the colors with different game modes, who knows?)
A super rough mockup is below... excuse the hideous pink I just grabbed a random color to show that it would be illuminated:
Any thoughts on the best way to do this? The plexi I plan on using is 1/4", the LED strip I plan on using for the edge lighting is 3/8". I am not set on any specific material for the frame, but all I can think of is just 3/4" wood to build the frame and then route a 3/8" channel for the LEDs and plexi to rest in. Then I could use some type of weather stripping or something to make up the difference to close that gap back to 1/4" so that the plexi isn't rattling around? Seems a bit janky but so far I'm not coming up with any more elegant solutions.
samej71:
I'd be concerned that the plexi will get scuffed by errant balls and very quickly not look nice. Have you done any tests?
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