D'aww, my little electronic baby :D

I've been having a great time lately working on some electronics projects. It's too bad I can't double-major here or anything or else I'd get an electrical engineering degree too. Fun stuff. Then again, maybe I just like it because I haven't had to take too many courses about circuits and programming and all that, just the basics. In any case, I'm glad that I have the resources and people around to help me turn my crazy ideas into real projects.

This week, I made my very own circuitboard for my clock project so that I can finally move it off the breadboard. I've never made a board before so I was really excited. I used EAGLE, which is a pretty neat program. It has libraries full of parts in their actual size so you can play around with their position on the board and be relatively certain that they'll fit. Plus it mirrors everything so that when you transfer the image to the board everything is in the right place. It also makes sure that lines aren't too close or touching where they shouldn't be. After printing the design with a laser printer, it was out of printer and into the laminator! Then I spent the better part of an hour swishing it around with glee in ammonium etching fluid before it was ready. And ta-dah! My very own special board.

I have sinned...

Must not buy clothes off internet. Must not buy clothes off internet.

Aw hell.
(today's shirt.woot.com)

Awesome clock is awesome

I did it! I built a clock! Well, I asked a bunch of questions and people explained a lot of stuff and offered help when things went wrong. I suppose I can say that I learned how to make a clock. This clock, in particular, which is the answer to, "What do you do with an extra half a pinball machine?" You make a clock out of the score reels!

(it's 14:46, FYI)
Now that it's actually working, I suppose it's time to find a nicer container than the cardboard box, as much as it adds to the do-it-yourselfiness of the whole project. Eventually I'm hoping to make the whole thing fairly steampunk in a nice wooden box. Of course, I'll have to leave some sections open or behind glass so everyone can see the cool parts.

A PCB would be a nice start, I think. I'll have to learn Eagle some time so I can make one. Maybe when I'm procrastinating midterms. I'd also like to replace the relays, if I can, with older ones that spark dramatically, for effect. I've kept some of the cloth wiring from the pinball machine for atmosphere.

All in all I'm really happy with this! Everything started out being so confusing, but now it actually makes sense, and that really is way cooler than just having a pinball clock.

Last week - where the heck do these wires go? And what does this picture mean?
This week - According to the chip pinout, pin 3 goes to the battery, 1 goes to ground, 4 goes to power...

Hooray!

Loose Ends

Last week of work. There are two things I want to accomplish:

-Draft a paper before my boss gets back
-Finish my super awesome not really at all work related side project (a clock made out of pinball machine parts!)

Supervisor returns tomorrow. Clock is almost finished, hurray!
Priorities might not quite be in right order. It's such a nice clock, though! Hopefully it can act as a distraction for a few days while I churn out something remotely resembling a paper.

An addition to the family

Well, the first pinball machine is a year old, which means biologically, it's time for me to have another one. It's been scientifically proven (*cough*). I've upped the ante and moved to something digital, ooh, ahh, shiny! It's so incredibly awesome that it even says WOW right on it, see:

Ok, maybe you can't read the WOW (or MOM, if you're my confused roomie), but you CAN see the awesome giant fireball bumper, right?

I am so. freeking. pumped.

Happy One-Year Birthday!

Mr. Pinball machine! After a year of staring at your innards, they almost sometimes make sense. Hooray! This is only a rough calculation of course, based on the fact that I brought you home during midterms, and afterwards I bought everyone pumpkin blizzards for hauling you around town...s... I hope you appreciate not being in a cold wet garage, although you sure have a funny way of showing it.

You are extra shiny in the darkness, tempting people with your bright lights.

And your guts are a glorious tribute to analog.

Thanks for being the best stupid evil pile of loveable junk in the house.

P.S: Shock me and I will burn you with the firewood.

Whoops...

I got so carried away that I forgot to post pictures. I finally finished painting, to a reasonable extent. Everything looks a lot better with paint on it :D It matched really nicely until I put on the clear coats, which sort of darkened things. Still, it beats no paint at all, and now the ball doesn't get stuck in divots while I'm playing! Woo!

Oooh, ahhh dramatic transformation

This is a chunk of the playfield after my laborious spiffing up efforts. Oooh, ahh! Pretty!



In this next photo you can see the entirely white blob from the previous picture has now become a fairly decent copy of the "Advance bonus when lit" on the other side.

Arts and Crafts!

I had a brilliant idea that it would be really fun to paint my pinball machine. After all, I don't really have anything to lose, and I love to arts and crafts now and again. If it turns out really terrible, I figure I'll just strip the paint and get an Arts student to paint something really cool on it. It's been a couple of weeks since I began(30 bottles of acrylic later...) and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.



For some reason I've been through 3 bottles of yellow already. Maybe the secret of aged dirty acrylic is yellowing. It's mildly disturbing though, I have a small container of yellowish looking paint that dries into pink, one that dries into orange, one that dries into white, one that dries into green, and one that dries into yellow (surprise!).

Before:

I think the ball wore a path into the game o_O

I'm just kind of ignoring this patch for now... I don't want to take stuff apart to paint, hehe. The last guy who owned this made rubber bumpers out of surgical tubing. How cool is that! I bought replacement rubber parts and replaced all of the rubber except for the surgical tubing. I think it adds to the ghetto feel. Ok, ok, it's not ghetto. Abandoned amusement park?

This is AFTER I cleaned it... wish I had pics from before, hehehe.

Pinball, pt. 2

I'd like to say that my pinball machine was shiny, pretty, and functional when I got it, but that would be lying. The paint had worn off the playfield, it was incredibly dirty, and as you can sort of see in the picture below, it was somewhat broken. I guess I melted the coil for that score reel and it wouldn't move anymore.

You know, I think I like broken things more than things that work. I'm not so sure I would have been motivated to poke around and figure out what was going on inside this thing if it had been entirely functional. I'm naturally curious about things, but not curious enough to willingly take a go at THIS...

Luckily I've been able to find some really cool people who are willing to explain the "what the hell is this?" and the "why is this broken?". It still takes an epiphany for me to figure out anything though, heh heh. Every time I fix something (even if it's incredibly minor), or it just starts working and I pretend like I fixed it, I do a giant victory dance. Mmm, sweet satisfaction.

Pinball, pt. 1

When I was little, we used to drive into the city to visit an arcade/jungle gym/center of everything fun center for a day. It was almost, if not equally as exciting as Christmas. To this day, I still love crazy climbing contraptions, laser tag, arcade games, and pinball.

Every winter, when I get bogged down by coursework and cabin fever, I tend to fantasize about these things. Stress just keeps building up until suddenly I find myself hanging upside down off of playground equipment outside of who-knows-where at 3 in the morning. Last winter, instead of the usual, more mundane stress relief, I ended up buying a pinball machine. Thank you, Craigslist, for fulfilling my childhood fantasies.

As soon as I saw the ad I knew it was destined to be mine. Apparently I called the poster 20 minutes after he put up the ad. He asked if I was sure I wanted it, or if I wanted to go visit and try playing it first, but I knew. This was destiny. So, one mooched truck later (thanks, pals!) and a drive across the city, I had a pinball machine. I think the best way of describing my feelings about this would be, "EEEeeeEEEeeeeeeeeEEEEEEE!"

Why I'm the coolest nerd EVAR

This is my baby.

I had always been entertaining the idea, deep inside my mind, that owning a pinball machine would be AWESOME. My rational, higher brain told me that I was full of baloney and that I would get bored of it and disenchanted over time. I really need to stop second-guessing myself.