NINE POINT THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Hi!

First off, thanks for following along. Nearly a thousand people have viewed this blog which is quite insane. Also bonkers: zero followers! I don't know if you know, but there is a way to follow this blog if you want to be informed when a new post comes along. You, yes you, could be the very first one! Wouldn't that be crazy? You could also be the last one, so don't get too excited ;)

Right. A fairly long one coming. Lots to catch up on, as I've been a bit snowed under and the weather has been fairly crap, which always slows me down.

I got two packages in the post. The top one is the upgrade for my Mag Stik to make it into a plus version. I had worried that it wouldn't be as nice as an off-the-shelf Mag Stik Plus as you have to carve bits off the plastic of your Mag Stik in order to make it into a plus. Well, my neighbour (who has asked me to build him an arcade machine, so that is the next project decided!) ordered a couple of the Plus versions and they are just the standard version with the modifications done (not as well as I did mine I might add!). Anyway, upgraded and it works a treat.

The second thing is an Arduino Pro Micro, and this gave me headaches. Like an idiot, I didn't bother testing it by plugging it into my PC to see if it worked. Instead, I went right ahead and soldered the pins onto the board. Now, I am a competent solderer. I have in the distant past chipped a few PS2's, something that requires the ability to solder a gnats nadgers to its leg. And so I arrogantly ploughed ahead and soldered it without checking. When I came to program it the software couldn't see the board. In fact, it didn't even show in windows device manager (should show up as a COM port). I swapped the USB cable for another, grabbing the best looking one from my cable nest, and it still didn't work. 

Assuming it was broken, and knowing that it would not be possible to send it back now I'd soldered it, I ordered another from a different seller - in case it was a bad one from a bad seller. Ten minutes after ordering the second one (they are very cheap, just £5.50 delivered) I was having a conversation on WhatsApp with a friend and explaining the predicament. He, quite rightly, asked if I'd tried another USB cable. I scoffed at him, explaining that I wasn't a complete moron and that of course I had tried another cable, what sort of idiot do you take me for? At that moment I glanced across at the cables I had tried which were sitting conveniently on the desk next to me. Something struck me; they looked very similar. In fact, they were more than similar, I had managed to pick up two identical cables. They were charger cables for my HTC Vive controllers. I quickly grabbed another cable from the nest and plugged it in. BEE-BEEP. 

Turns out, I am a moron after all!

This is the upgrade kit fitted. It was pretty straight forward.

I whipped together (drilled a load of holes in the middle of the night) a temporary control panel to try out the stick in a realistic setup. 

And then tested it out with a real-world test. Sensible World of Soccer running on an Amiga emulator. The Solomon Islands didn't know what hit them!

Testing complete I thought it would be a good idea to start building something for the new controls to live in. I whipped this up in Sketchup, note the height of the control panel relative to the desktop. 

Armed with a cut list, and dodging rain showers, I found this lump of MDF which was just big enough to cut all the parts from.

The top of the panel is sloped for comfort. The front and back boards would need a nine-point-three-degree bevel. This amazingly handy gadget allows you to do this with ease. You zero it on the tabletop of the saw, then it sticks with magnets to the blade telling you exactly how far to go. It's a bit tricky to get spot-on as even leaning against the table to press zero will move the angle. I got it this close and it turned out to be close enough!

See! Nine-point-three-degrees. Go ahead, measure it!

All the parts cut to width on the table saw. I switched to the mitre saw for all the lengths. 

And a first mockup of the final shape. It's all a bit pointy still. 

Clamped the two side panels together and began sanding off the corners.

Marked a line and cut the waste off with a jigsaw, not too close to the line as the blade tends to wander.

Back in the vice and a palm sander to finish off the curves. 

Another mockup. Much better looking. 

I decided to not cheap out (so much) on this build. And so I will be finishing the edges in T-molding to give it a little more of an authentic arcade feel. These slot-cutters are expensive, I bought this one years ago when I did my first arcade machine (which never actually had T-molding as I never actually finished it.)

Sides slotted. Will run T-molding all the way around with a join on the base section.

Cut a slot in the front of the control panel board. Hard to see in the pic, but it isn't straight. Turns out this piece of MDF, which used to be part of my desk, is bent. When I ran this over my router table the bow in the board made the slot run away from the centre line. I flipped it round and cut the slot, correctly, on the other edge. I will probably fill the wonky one.

Arcade holes. I really should credit where I downloaded the layouts for these, they are super handy. If you go to THIS website you will find all the layout plans you could ever wish for.

Decided to add pinball buttons on the sides. These will be wired in parallel with four of the top buttons. They don't need their own controller but it would be trivial to do so. Maybe I will do that later. 

The other hole in the panel is for this. My old spinner. My lovely step-father made this for me years ago and it deserves to be in a panel. Also, I will get to play Tempest again. I marked out where it needed to go, it's a bit too deep for the space under the control panel so I routed out a recess for it.

A coat of PVA mixed 50\50 with water. This is always a good idea with MDF.

That recess for the spinner. Also slapped some PVA around underneath to firm up the edges of the holes. They can crumble with buttons being pushed through them. 

Decided to mark out a couple of extra side panels for a player two module to make later. Figured it would be easier to get them now before I assembled.

Rough cut with the jigsaw.

Fitted a pattern bit to my router. This one turned out to be very blunt so swapped it for another.

Double-sided tape to hold the template and the new parts together.

And they are now identical. The tape worked really well. Came apart without too much of a struggle too.

And most importantly came off without damaging the surface.

These will be stored away for the player two panel.

Another mockup, this time with many holes. The pinball holes look like they are wrong, with the lower hole where your fingers are not. But this is by design, the lower hole is going to be a nudge button, and I don't want to accidentally hit this. So I put it slightly forward so I have to deliberately reach for it.

This is balanced on the wood that is inserted into the mortices in the front of the desk. 

I need to figure out how to mount this. I can't run the tenons that go into the desk right into this box as they would interfere with the buttons and the spinner. 

I cut a chunk of the large centre tenon off and decided to use that as a backboard. I would need to make a very strong joint between these two pieces of wood.

With my ryoba saw I cut very carefully (after marking the lines with a very sharp knife).

With the tenons in the desk I clamped the board and glued it in place with a few brad nails fired into the larger tenon.

I planed and sanded the top edge level. 

This is the back board of the control panel. I drilled some holes and...

screwed it to the mounting board. 

No reason not to start putting this together. I will be painting it, so after a thorough sanding, I got on with glueing it together.

A few brad nails again to keep things in place while the glue dries. These will be trivial to fill.

Getting excited by the prospect of making progress I suddenly realise I had made a mistake. The panel is much too high. It will be too uncomfortable to use like this. I had already glued it to the mounting board, fortunately the glue was not completely dry, so I was able to tear it off. 

Once I had repaired the damage caused by my slipup I fixed the mounting board to the control panel in the right place. 

And that's where I got to tonight. After I post this blog I will remove the clamps and test it in the desk again. 

Next some paint and maybe some art. Not sure what to do with this yet. 

Don't forget to subscribe! (if you want to, no pressure)

Oh! One last thing! I am thinking about streaming some retro games. Specifically, the games that I grew up with. Anyone interested in that? Let me know. If there's enough interest I will make it happen.

IT RAINED. DANGER! LAZY AT WORK!

Well, the weather took a turn. Been cold and wet here. Most of my cutting for arcade type stuff is done outside because that's where I have room and I don't need to worry so much about dust.

I got a few jobs done in the workshop. Added the gearstick to my racing setup. This required another cam-lock under the desk in the left slot. That went better than the one in the large centre slot, I might have another crack at that one another day. 

Have rarely used the gearstick with my wheel. The table clamp is terrible and the extra wire is just the last straw, such a pain to set up. But now it's just one more thing to slot into the desk and off we go. Played Dirt Rally 2.0 using the gearstick as a handbrake. Worked a treat.

A pic of the underside of the gearstick. Added an extra board so that I had something to screw through. It's super secure.

And now the moment literally nobody was waiting for! Time to start the arcade panel!

Went through the process of cutting and sticking and planing bits of wood to fit in the desk slots. Using the middle and left slot with the intention of making this a one player module that I can add a player two module that will attach to the right side of this.

In a high-tech fashion, I propped a bit of wood up to get a feel for angles. I tried all of one angle and this I deemed suitable and good. 

This arrived! It's a Mag Stik. Not a Mag Stik plus. Now the difference is quite important, I shall explain. The name, Mag Stik, is referring to the fact it has a magnet inside that brings the stick back to centre, not a spring. It has a very short throw and is really chunky. The Plus model allows you to lift the stick up and give it a twist, this will change the gate below the panel from 8-way to 4-way, or vice versa. This is cool. I have very rarely played games like Pacman or its like with a 4-way gate. The only reason for this is that my previous sticks required you to open your control panel, remove some screws and a plate, then either move that or swap it out for a different one, then replace the screws and the control panel knowing that as soon as you get bored of Pacclone you will need to do all of this again to switch it back. So you don't.

This solves that.

I thought the difference between the Plus and non-Plus version was the plus had a magnet and the non did not. That is incorrect. The difference is that the non-plus requires you to move a white switch (you can see it on the side of the black part of the underside) to change the gate. I was a little disappointed. 

Then I saw that Ultimarc do an upgrade kit for £8 (with free delivery!) so I have ordered that. It does require some alterations to my stick but I am pretty confident I can manage a little DIY :D

Keen to try out the stick I drilled a hole into a bit of board. 

The Mag Stik became lonely. So I drilled some holes and put in the new buttons I had bought with the Mag Stik. Gold leaf buttons. GOLD! They are really nice, very quiet and very responsive. I am very pleased with these. Microswitches have their place, but I grew up in old fashioned arcades and all the switches were leaf type. 

A better idea of the angle. Probably not as steep as this in the finished article.

Plugged in a zero delay encoder. These things are built to a budget, and that budget is bugger all. The first one I tried was faulty. I had a spare so that went in and enabled me to try out the stick and buttons. They are FANTASTIC. Once they are in a solid panel that doesn't move about I will be in arcade heaven. 

On a side note: the zero delay encoder has more than zero delay. Total marketing scam that name. There are videos about that show they have a whole frame of potential (not consistent) latency when compared to something like an Ipac. I am far too cheap for something so professional and so I dug about for alternatives. 

First was hacking up an old USB keyboard, but that has some problems with multiple button presses. I went down that road before and its difficult and fiddly to get everything soldered to a keyboard encoder.

The one I have gone for is an Arduino Pro Micro. You can pick clones of these up from fleabay for around £5 delivered and they make (so I am told here) excellent, very low latency encoders. So I ordered one and it should be here tomorrow. Very exciting!

And the only other thing I have to catch up on - I dug out my old spinner!

This was made for me by my very lovely Step-dad. He is a precision engineer and knocked this up for me out of solid aluminium (sorry 'mercans, that is how many i's it has ;) ) 

The centre part is the spinner, the top pokes up through a control panel. The bit on the left is a VHS tape head. The bearing of which is SUPER AMAZE (check out the vid on my tweet here) The spinner attaches to the top of this with a couple of screws.

Then the part on the right, which is upside down in this pic, attaches to the square bit on the left with the spinner going through that hole. This allows it to be attached to the underside of a control panel.

I will need a mouse, this one, to attach to the side of this to read the spin. This is a really nice, but well-loved and used, Microsoft Sidewinder Laser mouse I used for many years. 

I brutally gutted it and stripped out the bits ready to attach to the spinner. 

But that is where I finished. The spinner is going into a box, for now, I will revisit it when I find a place for it in the control panel scheme (it will need a trackball to keep it company).

And that is where I shall leave it for now. When it rained particularly bad one day I made a couple of hangers for my headphones and vive. I hope to be a bit more productive this next week!

Thanks for reading. If you came here from twitter don't be shy, say hi, make rude comments, tell me what I'm doing wrong, suggest cool stuff I could do. 

If you came here from elsewhere then give me a follow on twitter @ZZleeZZ

I will see you there!

HANGING ABOUT

Part of the reason for doing this modular desk attachment system project is to better organise all the stuff I have sitting around in my cave. So, having mounted the stick and throttle to the lovely desk extension, I built a small bracket and hung the flight stick desk on it. I think it looks pretty good there. Might end up moving it but for now, it is out of the way. Before I made this the stick and throttle were jammed into any available space, they are awkward to store and bulky, and at the same time fragile.

Flush with the success of that small bracket I turned to my racing wheel - and came up with this. It's upside down in this pic, easier to stand this way up for taking photos. Note the "knob" sticking out the front. There is a matching hole on the board that is attached to the steering wheel. 

On the wall, again, subject to moving later if I feel it takes up room where I might want shelves. Right way up now!

Wheel hung! It's a loose enough fit that it goes on easy but not so loose that it slops about.

And the pedals slot into the back. The pedals themselves don't touch the cross brace. I added a couple of bits to each side to wind the wires around, they worked out really good.

Ignore the wire going up to the lighthouse sensor. Much work still to do in here to get everything properly organized, including wire management.

Got a few jobs to do before I tackle the arcade panel. Still giving that some brain time to work out what I actually want it to do. I have a couple of cheapo arcade sticks all ready to go here, but I am tempted to buy something better. This will be, after all, my personal control panel. I won't be selling it unless I sell my whole desk along with all the other bits. Not gonna happen.

Other things I want to get sorted in here: somewhere to store my Vive VR headset and the controllers, along with battery charging for the controllers and the wireless adapter. A space for my Xbox one pad to live with easy charging. More storage. Less mess!

Keep an eye on my twitter. A lot of what I do goes on there first.