Sumpod Adventures - Part 2

I've now painted all the parts, and started assembly. It's definitely been an adventure. For those who don't know, spray painting MDF isn't fun. I went though an entire can of primer on two parts before I gave up and just brushed on some Kilz paint. After that dried, the spray paint worked great :)
I went with an orange and white color scheme. My wife calls it a creamsicle :) I only painted the outer pieces orange, and left the inside white as was suggested on the Sumpod forums. It should allow me to more easily see what's going on inside. It's also a matte finish on the inside, which I'm hoping will help with glare in videos.
I did learn an important lesson after painting. That is, I should have tested the fit on every piece before I painted them. There were quite a few places where there wasn't enough clearance and I had to sand to make parts fit. Luckily most of it is in places that aren't visible once assembled.

Sumpod Adventures - Part 1

So a few months ago I ordered a Sumpod 3D Printer. Due to numerous production issues, I received it last friday. I will try to show my progress here, and show any snags I run into. Hopefully it will help anyone who has similar issues. So now, on with the build!
The first thing I did was unpack and inspect all the parts, which is where the first issue came up. A few of the pieces had damaged corners, which isn't a big deal, but one part was damaged in a critical location. It's the top of the X axis. The end of it that holds the bearings for the belt is bent down, which would create a problem when trying to keep the belt aligned on the bearings and motor. And just for the record, Richard (creator of the Sumpod) did offer to send me a new part, however I figured I'd try my hand at fixing it first so he doesn't have to pay for shipping to the US.

I cut out a metal plate that would fit over the top and hopefully hold everything where it should be. This also presented some issues as the bolts were now too short. Also, the bolts for the bearings are underneath the top of the printer when assembled, and there is so little clearance that I had to use flat head bolts to avoid hitting the top of the printer. We'll see how it holds up when I get it all together.

Before:

After:

For those of you who are building your Sumpods, a great place to start is http://renaissance-engineer.net There are downloadable PDFs with instructions. However, I noticed that his hotend is slightly different from mine, so I will document that as best I can.

Bartop MAME Cabinet - Finished!

So I finally finished my bartop mame cabinet. Actually I finished it a few weeks ago, and I'm just now getting around to the documentation part :)

It turned out better than I expected, and my son loves it! I used a mini-itx mobo with an Intel Atom processor. This limited the front ends I could use. I wanted to use hyperspin, but it requires more than my little board can muster. I'm currently using mgalaxy, but I'd like to find something better (and free, I've already overspent on this project).

I did run into some problems during the build. I used weld-on plastic cement to fuse the main portion to the side panels, and it seemed to work well, but I needed to attach the monitor and the rear panel, and I just didn't trust the strength of it, so I ended up using screws. While it's not quite as pretty, I used stainless button head screws, so it's not bad looking. The other problem was with the monitor. I got it for free because it had a bad power supply, and it wasn't repairable (I tried). It ran on 12 volts, so I figured I'd just hook it up to the computer's power supply and everything would be fine. Well, the problem comes when the display and the computer share the same ground connection, and the video cable also carries a ground connection... Horrible lines on the display. I solved the problem by using a second, smaller power supply for just the display and then disconnecting its ground connection through the power cord. Even with these issues it came out really great.

Here's the specs for those who care...
21" LCD 1600x1200
Intel Atom Processor 1.6GHz
2GB RAM
120GB HD
Win XP Pro
mGalaxy frontend
I-Pac VE
2 8-way competition joysticks
18 Happ pushbuttons


Here are some pictures of the build...


Here's some of the button holes drilled. For the joysticks I countersunk some screws into small pieces of plastic and epoxied them in place. I then used the weld-on to attach them to the underside of the control panel for a seamless, no scew look.

Here's the control panel finished. In retrospect I should have waited until I finished drilling and working on the rest of it, but I just couldn't resist :)

This is the rear panel with the computer and power supplies mounted. I also mounted the speakers there.

Here's the back of the monitor and the control panel. You can see the speaker controls mounted just under the monitor on the left (from this side). I mounted the I-Pac to the back of the monitor since I found out that the sticky velcro shows through the acrylic :(

This is just the two pieces about to go together. You can see my ghetto L brackets. At least they are inside and can't be seen :)

Here's my son and my sisters having fun. I just need to figure out how to get them off it so that I can play!

If anyone has questions or ideas for different frontends, put them in the comments!

Bartop MAME Cabinet 3D Model

Here's the Sketchup model

Bartop MAME Cabinet

So here's my newest project. I'm building a bartop MAME cabinet. I've wanted to do it for years, and seeing the one at theTransistor (local hackerspace) gave me the push I needed. I decided to stray from the traditional building methods for a few reasons, the main one being that I already had different materials on hand. I'm building it out of white acrylic. I have most of the pieces cut out, I just need to glue them together and then lots of touch up to make it look good. Here's a couple pics of my progress so far. I hope to get it all glued together tonight.

This is the Main portion of the cabinet. It's on its left side.


This is one of the sides.

I hope you can see how it's going to turn out. I might try to embed my sketchup model.

Add a Reverse Switch to a Cheap Ride-On Quad

So wow, it's been quite a while since I've posted anything. I guess that's what a kid and a new house do to you. Anyway, I have a new project to share. For Christmas, we got our son a little motorized quad. Of course we got the cheap one because times are tough, but this meant sacrificing features of the more expensive models. That's fine for most things, but the killer feature was the reverse function because I'm sure my son would drive into a wall, and then yell until I came and saved him. As much fun as that sounds, I decided to do something about it.
So I added a reverse switch to his quad. It was a fairly simple matter, just a DPDT switch and some wire. The before and after schematic is below, showing how I wired in the new switch. The end product almost looks like it came that way, and now my son will be able to get himself out of trouble. I guess it's true that the best inventions arise out of laziness :)

Nikon Capture Free Update!

Good News, Nikon Capture Free is now on SourceForge! Here's the link...
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nikoncapture/
You should check it out even if you don't have a nikon d40, because it should work with most cameras that have a WIA driver.