Greetings!
I'd like to share my thoughts now that I'm almost finished my project:
First, thanks to everyone who gave me input. Whether it be sarcastic or not, I can appreciate how frustrating it can be when you know something and try to explain it to someone who doesn't. I don't consider my self an imbecile, but when it come to electrical, I don't like to take any chances, or risk ruining an expensive piece of equipment. So I ask as many questions as necessary until I can understand it in my lingo so to speak.
Thanks for your patience everyone!
When all the parts came rolling in I was naturally gung ho to get it going but I calmed down and took a more methodical approach, nowing I don't want to have to redo this whole thing so I made sure I knew what needed to be done. Many smoke breaks later I started assembling. I made sure to prime and paint everything up nice. Sanding etc...I'm more of a wood guy than anything. Once the pieces were dry I made sure to properly apply my cpo. Here some fun facts: that overlay cost me $170 shipped. Here in town it would have been $20 a square foot just to have it printed, and I had to supply the graphic. No laminate on it or nothing. Yay Canada.
I spent probably 30 getting the cpo done and it came out sharp. I'll upload pics when I get home.
After assembling the base, I got my mounting bolts installed, and I must say it does what I want it to do very well!
Easy off easy on, and the wing nuts with washers secure very well.
After getting it home (I did all the prep work at my shop. I make windows for a living). I set it up to start wiring. After aboot 2 hours of re reading all the advice I got, referring to the inter webs, I was confident enough to start laying out the assembly. I Started with getting the buttons and joysticks wired first. Wow what a chore. When you do it the first time it can be hairy, but I managed to get them all going plus the trackball. Except I mounted the trackball upside down. Fail. I thought the arrow meant up not down. Found all the grounds that I had put on the wrong prong and fixed those. Fired up mamas to do a test and discovered I had to flash each ipac mini separately. Fast forward another 2 hours, and BLAM! The whole board functions!
Now for the big job of ledwiz. So I start with the top six buttons just to get a feel for it. And I ran out of wire.....but anyways I try to fire up the power supply only to find out I needed to jump some wires on it first. Once that was running, I connected the six I had wired, and behold! Nothing happened. Wtfbbq. So I power down, check my connections, everything looks good. Come to find out buy trial and error, I had the bulbs backwards. Fail. So I go and test every lamp and switch all the backwars bulbs around rather that pulling all my connectors and risk breaking one. Note to new people. Pre check yer bulbs!
After download led blinky, and running the led test I got em going! Then I realised I just spent 7 hours on wiring alone so I said ---fudgesicle--- it I'll do the rest tomorrow.
You guys who have provided me with info, no matter how trivial you may think it is, have helped me achieve a 6 year dream of mine. Thank you very much.
Now what dimensions do you recommend for my base because the one I built gets kind of rickety when you're mashing street fighter. The one I made is 21 wide, 21 deep, 30 tall. I've seen some examples around but I think I'm going to have to go with an "A" shape to avoid side to side tipping. Front and back don't seem to be an issue.
Have a good day!