I LOVE THE SMELL OF SOLDER IN THE EVENING

May 2nd and 3rd coming right up.

Small distraction before I kick-off. Had to make a picture frame for a birthday present for my dear ole ma. Was nice to make some sawdust again. I'm happiest in the sun making a lot of noise and dust. My neighbours actually like me!

Once that was done it was time to continue wiring the controls. A daisy chain of ground wires. Tedious work cutting, stripping, twisting, fluxing, tinning, soldering each one of these to the terminals. 

All done. I made a separate loop for each controller to make diagnosing faults easier.

Checked with my trusty multimeter. No problems at this stage but the wires would be pulled around through the next stages so these will need checking again.

Love these! A few pounds on Amazon. Dupont connectors. Some are male/male some are female/female some are female/male. I think they are all equally lovely ;) 

I used a male/male to soldered to each terminal.

Kept the colour coding the same on each side.

Now I needed to find somewhere to mount the raspberry pi. There is a lot less room than it looks in this case.

Cut a thin piece of ply and glued it in place with hot glue. Also glued on the monitor controls so they don't move about.

See them better here.

I looked at plastic spacers for mounting the pi, they were really fiddly. I went into my PC screw nest and found some matching height motherboard standoffs. Drilled some holes the right size and screwed them right into the wood.

The screws were not very secure so I glued them in place with hot glue.

Oh, look! Another mistake! The power, HDMI, and 3.5mm audio are all facing out. They need to be facing in.

I still hadn't spotted the mistake. Connected the first wires to the GPIO, these are the start buttons from under the bezel. You can see the back of them covered in hot glue.

And we caught it just in time. Power, sound and picture all plugged in now. 

Wires all fed up through the back of the control cavity. They plug into matching female/female cables which are then plugged onto the GPIO connector on the pi.

Spotted a broken solder joint. Would not be the last one!

And all the wires are in the right places.

Fired it up to check everything things still work. They do. Next, I need to configure the GPIO drivers to enable the controls.