This past month I celebrated my 35th birthday. It was an Arcade bonanza! Thanks to Karla spreading the word to her family I recieved an Imperial Trackball, Slik Stik Tornado Spinner, and four Happs Perfect 360 joysticks.
Naturally I couldn't wait to try it all out, but with our new baby only weeks away I didn't have much time. Finally this past weekend I finished everything else that needed to be done in preparation for the baby. So I dove into building a new control panel.
The first thing I did was to lay everything out in Visio. This saves a lot of time because you can visualize several different layouts before deciding which one to use. Plus then you can print out a full scale layout to use for drilling out the button holes.
So that's exactly what I did. Here is the Visio Drawing. I taped the Visio printout to some old shelving that I had lying around. The shelving gave me a nice smooth surface to work with, and provided a rounded front edge. I also had enough for the left and right sides. The remainder of the box was made with 3/4 inch MDF.
I next set to work cutting all of the material to size. Next was to drill out all of the button holes. I needed a jig saw for the large Trackball opening. I then put the sides and bottom together with my framing nail gun.
Using a piano hinge, I attached the top to the rest of the box, and inserted all of the controls. Nothing was wired in, but at least I could see what it would look like. So far, this all pretty much took all day Saturday.
Here's where the real fun began. Sunday I started in with the wiring. I learned from my Prototype II experience that it would be much easier to use a terminal strip to run all of the common lines to. This was indeed much easier than trying to daisy-chain the wires.
The wiring took pretty much all day (including a trip to the hardware store AND Radio Shack). I tried to keep the wiring neat, but by the end of the day I just wanted to get it done.
Finally, using some spare 2x3's I had lying around, I built a small stand to secure the whold control panel to. The picture to the left shows the final assembly as seen hooked up to my Monovision 27 inch monitor.
