I SEE THROUGH YOU

MAYDAY! 1st of May 2020. 

After another couple of days off (arting is HARD, also it had rained a lot) it was time to get moving again. First job on the list was the clear coat. Not a lot of pics of this as it really isn't very easy taking a photo of something transparent. A clear afternoon with a low chance of rain meant I had to spray in my shed, not ideal but it had to be done at some point, and relying on the weather in the UK is something you learn not to do.

Between coats, I worked on a shelf for my hand planes (extra shelf at the bottom for my vernier and spirit level).

Nothing much to see here, which is a very good thing. If this was going to go wrong it would be most likely now. I ended up giving most of the cab three coats and the side art four coats.

No excuses now. Time to start filling this puppy up from the back... er, that came out wrong. And that is most definitely not what she said.

Monitor in, along with the power strip.

Base access gives me smug face. It is so much easier than the last cab I made. Sticks going in. 

And the buttons. These took some work to get in, I ended up having to rub down the holes a little. They had been given a coat of PVA, that makes the fibres of the MDF stand up and go really hard (can't get Steve Carrel out of my head! THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID) they needed a lot of shoving to get them in (oh for crying out loud!)

Looking sweet. Buttons are in for start and select, select below the control panel and start in the screen bezel.

The parents of my nephews kindly offered to help with some of the bigger expenses. They delivered a Raspberry pi 4 and this official power supply. Pretty neat.

That replaced the Anker PSU I had been using, you can see it on the left here. Earlier I had shortened a kettle lead for the monitor and extended the flying lead for the power strip. 

This nest is a VGA cable, plugged into a VGA to HDMI converter, plugged into a HDMI to MicroHDMI converter. Sigh. Pi 3 and below has HDMI, Pi Zero has MiniHDMI and Pi 4 has MicroHDMI!

A test of speakers and screen. The screen had been stored in my workshop for months and I have no idea how it survived that environment. Constantly getting knocked and moved, and terrible dust. It works fine.

Screwed on the nuts for the buttons, this is surprisingly hard. You can buy special tools for this. I recommend those!

Broke out the soldering iron for the last job of the day. I have all the correct crimps for these terminals, but in the past I had too many had failed on me. I needed this to be very reliable. I know it can still fail but I took a lot of care checking all these joints before I sent it off and I'm reasonably confident it should last a decent amount of time. Here I have added a daisy chain for the ground connections on player two.