Sunday, July 31, 2011

Cabinet head!

Finally got time to work on the cabinet head.

As I've mentioned earlier, the old cabinet head was far too tilted to be salvaged.
It also wasn't matching up nicely depth-wise with the cabinet - making it look a bit flimsy, kind of like a tiny head on a giant body. Not cool.

I've ordered a red LED-display (128x32, PinLED, same display as in Stern's international versions of Spiderman and Family Guy) so in a few days I'll hopefully have my machine drawing pretty pictures for me while it speaks! I was going for a plasma display at first, but as it turned out they needed either A) a lot of high voltage power, or B) a lot of money from the buyer. I also didn't find any red plasma screens, but I've read they're filterable to display red instead. Anyway - 
The PinLED display was in an acceptable price range and I'm a sucker for the red glow, so it was a no-brainer. Looking forward to hooking it up!

The speaker and display panel is prepared as well and the new head is looking rather nice, although it's still unfinished. I figure I can use magnets to keep the translite locked in place (this may change in the future) so that lightbulbs can be changed easily in-place. 

I will put a ventilation grill on the back and I hope to get good airflow with cold air being pushed into the cabinet from underneath and hot air being drawn out with a fan on the cabinet head. I'm not expecting a lot of heat anyway since it's all modern tech inside, but it won't hurt to have good ventilation!

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Behind the Scenes

It's been a while since the last post (almost a month!) but things are not standing still. The project has just come to the point where I need a little help. Since I'm making the pinball machine in my living room, there are limits on what can be done around people and pets. Such as working on metal.

I've also finalized the lights layout and the layout of the actual playfield and feel confident enough to do an attempt on a proper whitewood board. Therefor I need to have a new playfield properly routed by professional woodworkers (or find somewhere where I can properly work the wood with electric tools) so that I get nice, clean, cuts for the inserts etc.

I've stretched out to find good companies for printing the artwork for the machine and play field and found a great local company. Just hoping they find the time to aid me with this. The graphics are not 100% done, but hopefully they will be soon.

The ruleset is also taking form and a lot of the features are already decided. If I pull of the things I've planned, this will be one epic board!

So things are indeed moving along quite nicely, it's just happening behind the scenes at the moment.