Tuesday, January 29, 2008

This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then - explode.

Interesting weekend.

Saturday was supposed to be the day I finished wiring my control panel, configured the buttons, and finalized my cabinet so it was playable for Sunday.

The reality was a bit different.

To start with, I encountered all manners of issues with the buttons. It turned out that the ground and signal crimps weren't tight enough for the leaf-style micro switches I had installed on some of the buttons. It was causing them to disconnect intermittently. Once I compressed the end very tightly, they were reliable.

Then I ran into an issue with the coin door. It turns out you can't ground the coin door switches to a second Mini-PAC, they have to be grounded to the same Mini-PAC that the signal is connected to. Important lesson learned.

Then the button configuration. You have to make sure you've unplugged all but the Mini-PAC you intend to program, otherwise you're going to drive yourself nuts.

So I finished at 11pm on Saturday, got up at 7am on Sunday and worked until about 3:30 pm to get it up and running.

I'm still going to have to remap some of the keys, as the CTRL and ALT keys seem to cause all manners of conflict in Windows. As well, I have an issue with the blue trackball not wanting to reliably detect a spin on the X-axis. 'Fozzy Bear' on the BYOAC forums suggested it might be a trackball spindle that needed more oil, and after disassembly I'm inclined to agree. The spindle seems to have far too much friction.

So tonight I'll be focused on putting some oil on the 2 spindles and 4 bearings that seem to need it, as well as re-configuring the key map.

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