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Building the main box
05/01/2015 at 21:38 • 0 commentsI built the base cabinet first, and left the backbox for later.
The first part of building the cabinet was sawing the sides to shape (with my favorite tool, the Japan saw.
Next, drilling holes for the buttons and plunger:
I then screwed on some smaller wood pieces so that I could screw the front and sides onto the base. In retrospect I think maybe I should have used iron angles screwed on the inside instead of screwing through the front and sides pieces. This way I would not have had to use filler (spackel) over the screws on the sides, an dI could maybe disassemble the box later without destroying the paint on the sides.I made the hole in the base for the subwoofer by drilling out parts and then sawing it out. I was a bit afraid that the cabinet would be weakened by the big subwoofer hole (and the subwoofer is one of the heaviest components of the cabinet). But that turned out not to be a problem.Checking the fit:I screwed some small pieces onto the sides to support the playfield monitor.The corners are held by the leg brackets. The back brackets are turned upside down so that the front legs are attached higher on the cabinet than the rear legs. This makes them shorter, and the entire cabinet tilted a bit towards the player.
I glued in triangular wooden pieces behind the leg brackets to make it easier to drill the holes for the leg bolts later. They are not visible in these photos.
I hoped that I had calculated the dimensions properly, and I had!This is what the cabinet looked like from the back:I had to give it the first test run in the cabinet:This assembly only took two to three days - I had the pieces home on January 17, and did the first test on January 19. It really felt like the project was moving along quickly now, especially after spending a month planning, doing Sketchup work and buying second hand components. -
Buying Plywood
05/01/2015 at 20:51 • 0 commentsThere were several qualities and thicknesses of plywood available. Modifying the Sketchup model to adapt for changing plywood thickness was really error-prone and annoying.
Using the measurements from the Sketchup model, I calculated the area of the sides of the cabinet and backbox. It came out to 1.86 m² by treating the sides as rectangles.
Finally I settled for a fair grade of pine plywood, 10 mm thick, 2m x 1 m for 498 kr (€53) at Fredells.
I used Inkscape to make a plan for how to fit the various pieces onto the plywood, and how to have the lumberyard cut the sheet (red lines) with as few cuts as possible (they charged for each cut, I ended up paying 100 kr (€11) for the cuts:
Unfortunately it turned out that the lumberyard could only cut all the way across the sheet, so I had to do some quick improvisations.Finally, I had my pieces:
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Planning, CAD, Ventilation
04/08/2015 at 21:52 • 0 commentsI spent countless hours in December 2014 making a CAD model of the cabinet in Sketchup.
In the Github repo you can find different versions of the Sketchup model:
I realized that I had to buy the major components so that I could adapt the size of the cabinet to the major parts (monitors, subwoofer and speakers, mainly).
Speakers
The VIsual Pinball and VPinMAME software is supposed to be able to separate the pinball table's music etc from the simulated sounds of the flippers and bumpers into separate speaker channels.
Therefore I got a 5.1 speaker system, with the intent of placing two satellite speakers in the front part of the cabinet to play the sound effects, two satellite speakers in the backbox, and a subwoofer in the middle of the cabinet.
Monitors
I 'decased' my monitors, taking the plastic frame and back off to make the cabinet as slim as possible.
Originally I had planned on using two monitors, but after learning that my motherboard could drive three monitors simultaneously, I decided to get a third small (15") monitor for the dot matrix display (DMD, which shows the scores among other things). I'll rotate it 90° and place it in the base cabinet behind the subwoofer (inspired by zany's build, see their video here which is much more fancy than my mounting).
CAD
I measured the monitors, speakers etc and made models ('components' in Sketchup terminology) for them.
The height of the cabinet was determined by the subwoofer, which is placed directly below the playfield screen.
I tried to get the proportions as similar as possible to a real pinball cabinet. The cabinet tilts about 3° due to the legs being higher in the rear (they are mounter further down on the cabinet) than in the front, the angle of the playfield relative to the cabinet is about another three degrees, and the top part of the cabinet is another three degrees, summing to about 9° from the horizontal.
The whole cabinet is about 40 cm wide by 80 cm deep.
I changed my mind about what thickness of plywood to use a couple of times, and Sketchup required lots of manual fiddling to adjust all the dimensions.
Ventilation
Many pinball cabinet builds seem to have large fans at the back of the cabinet. I will try to manage with out them.
My plan for the ventilation is to make holes at the bottom front of the cabinet, where cool air can enter. The air will be heated by the monitor and motherboard, and be drawn through the power supply, which is placed right in front of the subwoofer. I'll try to block of the center of the cabinet around the subwoofer and cabinet, so the air is forced through back through the PSU. Then it will rise behind the backbox screens, and exit and the top back of the cabinet, like a chimney. I'll make some holes for letting cool air in at the rear bottom of the cabinet too.
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Project Starts, Buying Monitors and Computer
04/07/2015 at 15:09 • 0 commentsAround the beginning of December 2014, a friend of mine, Adam Klotblixt, told me about people building physical pinball cabinets with monitors as playfields, running the free Visual Pinball software. I decided this was the next project I wanted to do.
The first step was to see if I could find cheap used monitors. I got lucky, and bought one 23" and one 24" Dell IPS widescreen monitor for about €16 each. IPS monitors are good because they have good viewing angles. I ended up using the 24" monitor as playfield, exchanging the 23" monitor for the 20" IPS screen my desktop computer used, and using the 20" monitor for the back box.
I also bought the single most expensive part of the project - the guts of a new computer. I chose an Asus H97M-E motherboard with an Intel i3 4150 3,5 GHz CPU, 8 GB of fast RAM, and a 1 TB WD Blue 10EZEX mechanical hard disk. I used a power supply I already had. Total cost: €348.
I wasn't sure if the Intel 4400 integrated graphics would be fast enough, but it works fairly well. If neccessary I'll add a discrete graphics card.
Also, I didn't think the motherboard / CPU would be able to drive three external monitors at the same time, but it turns out that it did.
Up to this point, I had never run the Visual Pinball software, so I installed it to try it out. Unfortunately it only runs under Windows. Instead of paying hundreds of euros for Windows, I downloaded the free Windows 10 technical preview. My favorite pinball game, Tommy, worked fine, so I decided to go ahead with the rest of the project.