Building Arcade Hyperspin/Mame cabinet - Part 3

The final coat of blue added this morning. Sanded back the first coat of blue and then put on the last coat as evenly as possible. 

The console. Just add buttons and artwork!

Some of the front, sides and edges.

Although the paint isn't as glossy as I imaged it to be overall I am very happy with the result - it isn't perfect, but I've been told that gloss paint is one of the more difficult paints to get a flat finish on and I'm happy to have learned a new skill.

I have packed up the Dexter shed - there'll be no more painting this year. There might be a edge piece or two where the paint isn't complete that might be visible and if that is the case I might be a small very fine air gun to paint those parts after the cabinet has been built.

I will try seeing how far I can get with wiring up the console this evening and am hoping to enlist the assistance of a couple of friends in putting the cabinet tomorrow morning.

Hopefully the next post has completed pictures :)

Building Arcade Hyperspin/Mame cabinet - Part 2

It's been a busy couple of painting days!

Firstly I went back to Super Cheap Auto and picked up a proper painting mask and better safety goggles. I didn't mind the white too much with the bad mask, but wasn't looking forward to the blue paint.

I then sanded the pieces back and put on the second layer of primer. I was smart enough to have stored a couple of pieces on top of each other before they were fully dry so I needed to pry them apart and then repair the MDF with some white TimberMate wood putty that I had spare from a previous project. I find it is best to just apply the putty with your hands rather than using a putty knife.

I also used the TimberMate again to seal some very small gaps in the console where some of the panels met. I was expecting the paint to fill the gaps, and it probably would have by the last coat, but better to be safe and sorry and it only takes a couple of minutes to do.

At the end of the day I had re-primed most of the pieces.

The next day I did some more minor repairs with the primer here and there and then sanded the paint back one more time. I then put on my first blue coat. The blue paint came much easier out of the spray gun which is making the job faster, but more challenging as it is easier to get a build up of paint.

First coat of the blue paint

I think the colour looks great. On a couple of the pieces I struggled getting even coverage (I had to turn  up the pressure a little bit on the air compressor to fix this) so I will sand these pieces back tomorrow morning and do them again for a final coat *fingers crossed*.

I'm glad I got the painting mask. Below is a picture of the mask after painting the first coat of blue.

The blue pad in the mask was originally white!

So my current plan is to finish up the blue painting tomorrow morning and wire up the console in the evenings over the next couple of days. Then on Sunday I hope I'll be able to put it all together and finish tweaking on Monday.

Building Arcade Hyperspin/Mame cabinet - Part 1

About 5 years ago I had a project on the back of my mind to build an Arcade cabinet for home. At the time I looked into buying a build it yourself kit, however I could only find a company in Texas that did the parts and it would have been thousands to have it built and shipped to Australia. The other parts were also expensive so I let the dream slide.

Enter ArcadeWorx. Recommended to me by a guy in the office who has been looking at building his own cabinet. Troy at ArcadeWorx is a great guy to work with and cuts a variety of designs from MDF.

I found the Viewlix 32" Clone cabinet on their site and then emailed Troy with a couple of design changes I wanted - extra buttons and speaker layout. These weren't a problem however there were some restrictions on the TV to use so I started researching on-line and ordering parts.

The inside parts of the machine

Initial Parts list: 

TV - 32" LG 32LS4600. Fit the cabinet and supported 1080P which I was after not that easy to find in an afforable screen. Bought from Bing Lee online.

Speakers - 4" Polk DXi400 car speakers bought from Amazon. I love Polk stuff.

AMP - 2 Channel LP 2020A Lepai amplifer order from HK on eBay. Small unit I found recommended on AussieArcade forums.

It took a couple of weeks for the Viewlix clone to arrive. The shipment arrived in three flat pack boxes.

Sides and Back

Control Panel

Lots of pieces!

Initially I wanted to get the cabinet professionally painted. I visited an Auto Paint and Panel place across the road but they wouldn't have been able to start until the new year (for ~$700!) and my target is to have this done by New Years Eve.

I have never used a paint spray gun before so I watched a bunch of YouTube videos online and then obviously a qualified expert went to the Bunnings. 

It turns out that Bunnings doesn't sell Two Pack paint (used on cars). Being new to spray painting I was a bit nervous and was talked into trying the water based Dulux Aquanamel Gloss paint normally used for Trim and Window frames. This type of paint apparently "won't yellow" and should provide a good result.

I figured Water based would also be a safer option and would make it easier to clean up mistakes.

Primer and Aquanamel paint and paint mask

From the wall of colours, I chose Wing Commander Blue - seemed fitting. It will be interesting to see how it looks in gloss when it goes on.

While in Bunnings I also bought a Wagner W550 Fine Spray gun ($129), drop sheets, masking tape and simple paint masks. I then went home and prepared my "Dexter shed" for paining.

Dexter Shed

The Wagner W550 is an electric all-in-one unit which is very simple to setup and clean, however on a test piece I found it was spattering the paint too much, and using too much for an even coat. I tried making a few adjustments but I was not getting a good finish.

Wagner W550

The box showed people painting fences and kitchen cabinets. I'd recommend maybe for a picket fence or similar however I don't think I would have been happy with the result.

On the weekend my Dad came round to help with the Wagner and after giving it another go we decided to go buy a proper air spray gun kit. Off to SuperCheap Auto where we bought a SCA Gravity Feed Pro spray gun ($99) and a Black Ridge 2HP/21L air compressor ($119) and a hose. We were flying a bit blind here and the staff weren't very helpful, but everything seemed to come together.

Air Compressor

Serious Spray Gun

The difference between the Air Spray Gun and the Wagner was night and day. I was also using a LOT less paint with a much better result. I painted the primer on most of the outward facing pieces over a couple of hours and called it a day.

Drying parts inside the shed.

Storing dried parts outside.

The plan over the next couple of days is to sand back the primer and prime again - I will have to buy another tin of primer as the small tins are a bit small and the edges of the MDF where it was cut is very thirsty.

I will also have to go an buy a real paint mask. The simple masks aren't good enough - the hair in my nose was white!

Stay tuned for updates over the next couple of days.

Resolved Macbook Pro sound and Thunderbolt issues on Windows 8 RTM

I've had Windows 8 RTM installed on my Macbook Pro (8,1) for a number of weeks now and I haven't had any sound (Device Manager sees a High Definition Audio Device, but it cannot start) on the laptop. In addition to this my Thunderbolt display also did not work - the sound and USB ports did work, but the display did not come on during boot.

I read on-line that there were some issues related to EFI and Windows 8 x64 so I reinstalled MacOS X, then installed Windows 8 using the boot camp assistant. I then installed the bootcamp drivers in Windows.

After this I booted into MacOS and installed rEFIt and ran the "/efi/refit/enable-always.sh" script. Then on reboot I chose Windows from the rEFIt boot menu, and the Windows logo appeared on my Thunderbolt display and sound worked correctly.

From MACOS you can also edit /efi/refit/refitrefit.conf to set the default OS and timeout period if you want to boot into Windows most of the time and not have to push enter.

I'm happy now, but I'll suppose I'll have to wait for an EFI update or new drivers before I can remove reFIt and have Windows 8 running fine.

Bonus tip: I've also purchased Start8 ($4.95) to add the Windows start button back. In addition, Start8 also boots your directly to the desktop rather than the "Metro" interface.

I like what Microsoft is trying to do with the "Metro" interface, but it just doesn't work for me and how I use my computer. If I just wrote some emails and could live on an IPad - Metro would most likely be fine.

Windows 8 with Start8 installed

Installing Polk 8" RC80i ceiling speakers

A long time overdue, I installed one of my 8" Polk RC80i ceiling speakers which I purchased last November in the study today. I've been meaning to do this since the start of the year and had not gotten round to this yet knowing that it would be a bit of a task.

I started by roughly working out the position that I wanted the speaker on the ceiling by measuring the distance from the walls adjacent to the where I wanted the speaker to be. I then climbed into the roof and measured the same distance from the walls and found a place as close a possible to where I wanted the speaker without a beam or power cables in the way. 

I then cleaned away the insulation in the ceiling (wear gloves and a dusk mask) and placed down the cardboard circle shaped paint shield that was supplied with the speaker to make sure that the speaker would fit in the place I had chosen. I then made a small hole in the centre of the shield and through the ceiling with a drywall saw.

Drywall saw - essential tool.

It was quite difficult to push through the hole as my ceiling is made of a combination of mortar, horse hair (?) and wooden slats. This installation would be much easier in a modern house.

From inside the room I was relieved to see the hole where I wanted it to be and then used a pencil to draw the 8" circle from the cardboard cutout guide supplied with the speaker and then used masking tape to make a circle around the outside of the speaker to try and minimise any damage to the ceiling and keep the ceiling clean. 

I then used the drywall saw (wear eyewear protection and a dusk mask) to cut from the hole from below in the center of the circle to the edge and started to cut away the plaster around the inside of the circle.  

Initial hole and vacuum cleaner setup to collect dust.

Circle to remove outlined with masking tape and initial cut.

Once I started pulling away larger pieces of the plaster ceiling the wooden slats were visible from below. It was quite difficult to cut the slats with the drywall saw so I used my Dremel 3000 with the cutting piece attached. I was considering using my jigsaw, but I think the Dremel did a better job as it allowed better control.

Horse hair and slat ceiling

Dremel with cutting piece.

Next I then unpacked the speaker and then used a paper clip to remove the speaker grill from the speaker. This step was actually quite time consuming and eventually I had to hook through the paper clip through the grill and then pull the ends with a pair of pliers to get the grill free. Access under the grill is necessary to screw the clamps on the speaker down from inside the room with a philips-head screwdriver. At this point I enlisted the help of the Drinks Master to hold the speaker up from the bottom and tighten the clamp screws while I positioned the clamps on to the slats with most support from with-in the ceiling.

Ceiling speaker installed in the ceiling without the grill.

Speaker installed with grill.

The whole process took quite a few hours working mostly solo, although I needed assistance from the Drinks Master to push the speaker into the ceiling while I was in the roof above. The dust and masonry from the ceiling made a terrible mess and took quite a while to clean up even with painters drop sheets over the desks in the room below.

Although I have only done the single speaker so far, the sound is great connected to a Sonos Connect:AMP.  I now have three of them: Bathroom and Kitchen, Library, and Patio with a Sonos PLAY:5 in the Bedroom.

Sound wise - definitely more bass than the 6" RC60i speakers that I have installed the kitchen and the bathroom. I'm very happy with the result - once I can build up the energy to make a mess again I'll tackle the second speaker :)

Nike+ Fuelband hangs on Connecting to Nikeplus.com

I have sold a number of Nike+ Fuelbands recently - they're great devices and not yet available in Australia. A great review can be found here.

A couple of people I have sold them to have had a problem that after a period of use when connecting the device to a computer running the Nike+ Connect software the software will start and hang on "Connecting to Nikeplus.com".

Reseting the device manually from the band does not resolve the problem. The fix is to  disconnect the computer from the internet. Then reconnect the band and you will be able to access the Nike Connect software and reset the band from with-in the software which appears to resolve the problem. You can then reconnect to the internet and follow the setup wizard for the band and everything should be back to normal.


Hope this helps. I couldn't find this solution searching the internet...

Custom DNS for Unblock US Fritzbox 7390

UPDATE- Sonos/MOG US have made some changes so that this method no longer works and you receive "unable to browse music" error message. More details in the comments.

I have had some problems recently with MOG no longer working from my Telstra cable connection. My Sonos was reporting authentication issues with MOG, but I could still log in to the website when VPN'd to the US.

Visiting the MOG website showed that Telstra had partnered to bring MOG to Australia. It will be interesting to see the pricing to see the "Australia tax" when it is finalised in the upcoming months. Most likely this partnership has resulted in regional DNS configuration which was directing my queries to the Telstra MOG servers where authentication was denied.

Sonos devices use the DHCP configuration for their network configuration and there is no way to manually specify DNS servers so I needed to change my DHCP server (Fritzbox 7390) from giving out the Bigpond DNS servers and handout the Unblock-US DNS servers instead.

I found many guides on line on configuring custom DNS servers on the Fritzbox via telnet and editing the configuration file, however these changes did not seem to have any affect. My suspicion is that these settings work when using an ADSL provider, but using a LAN1 port via Cable modem did not have the settings apply.

It turned out that by applying a new beta firmware that you can now properly configure the Fritzbox to use custom DNS servers. MOG is now working a treat and Netflix is now working on all devices without having to set manual DNS servers on my devices.

Grays Online TV auctions...

I've just won a refurbished Sony Bravia HX925 TV at auction!

I was looking at the Sony models as they have a Motion Flow feature which apparently improves the picture of streaming services such as Netflix or lower quality movies and episodes.

The lowest new online price I could find for the same model was about $2,800 when I came across found four refurbished Sony Bravia auctions at Grays Online. It looks like both Sony and Samsung offload their refurbished and returned TVs via Grays.

Grays has an odd auction format compared to Ebay in that after the auction time has passed the status changes to "Going Going - Gone" for the next ten minutes where anyone has a chance to outbid you which will then reset the timer for another ten minutes until there are finally no more bids.

I was planning to initially bid on the HX820 model of which there were two available. However, I thought that I would start bidding on the HX925 and when that got too expensive I would switch my bidding to the HX820 instead.

My autobid on the HX925 was set to $1800 - remembering that Grays generally charge a 15% "buyers premium".

At the pointy end of the auction the HX925 was quickly bid up to $1500 at which point I went head to head with another bidder to the final price ($1,614) - waiting for that "Going, going, gone" status to clear was an eternity, but it was a great relief once it had been confirmed that I had won.

It turned out that my rival bidder had decided to do what I was planning to do and started bidding on the HX820 TV sets which had a slower start but were still slowly creeping up together. Eventually the two HX820 sets went for $1,629 (more than I paid!) and $1,599 more than 40 minutes later.

Checking the bid history my rival ended up outbid on both the HX820 sets.

Final sales prices:

The television comes with a 3 month warranty and in the next 10 days or so (delivery time to Adelaide)  I'll discover the downsides to getting the refurbished model. The description for "Refurbished" suggested there might be some small scratches or missing manuals. The two pairs of 3D glasses that is normally included may also be missing.

I'll update once I have received the TV as well as documenting my wire-frame picture mount installation.

Streaming UltraMusic festival live to my Sonos via JamCast!

Ultramusic Festival in Miami is absolutely amazing - I was there a couple of years ago. If you're into dance music you should make the pilgrimage at some point.

My friend let me know they were streaming it live on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/umftv - Live Now button) so I had to look into it.

Firstly I needed to connect to StrongVPN as the streams are not available outside of the USA. I don't understand how in this day and age these restrictions are still in place.

Martin Soleveig

Watching the stream I was surprised to hear that is was pretty high quality. The sound engineers have done an amazing job mixing the music with the noise of the audience.

Of course my next thought was on how could I stream the audio from my computer from my Windows computer. Enter Jamcast. I've signed up for a 14 day trial which allows me to setup from my Windows Audio loopback adapter to be a Radio Station which I can add to the Sonos interface.

Click the image below to see it working in all it's glory :)

Sonos playing YouTube sound via JamCast

In JamCast I set the Capture Buffer Size on the Virtual Sound Card to be 1 second so there would not be a really noticeable delay from the stream and then added the Radio Station via Sonos Desktop Controller in the following format: http://192.168.178.53:58642/Media/audio/mpeg/CaptureStream

(192.168.178.53 - being the IP address of my Windows PC).

Awesome - Enjoying live streaming from around the world around the house. This makes Sonos worth the money :)

A hobby a long time coming...

I have always been interested in electronics but have never felt that I have had the understanding that would allow me to work on projects of my own design - I have always copied existing designs having fumbled my way through breadboards, wafer and season cards back in the satellite hacking days.

Hopefully that is about to change. I've enrolled in Circuits and Electronics at MITx - MIT University's beta  online subject (free). On completing the course students receive a certificate and hopefully an understanding of basic electronics.

It will be an interesting challenge for. Year 12 Physics is a distant memory and I will be doing some preparation via the Khan Academy before the course starts. Maths at an advanced level is always something I have struggled with as well so it will be interesting to see how I go.

To help on the hobby front and possibly with the course I have ordered a Sparkfun Electronics Start Kit for  Arduino from Robot Gear (an Australian distributor). The kit contains a whole bunch of buttons, LEDs, wires, sensors and the smallest breadboard I have ever seen. I've been following the Arduino project for a while now and I'm dipping a toe in.

I'm going to work through the tutorials to try and get a good understanding of the Arduino. So far a couple of the video tutorials I have watched have given great explanations of what is actually happening in terms I am familiar with - i.e "Electricity is lazy, it won't go through the resistor if it doesn't have to".

I've also ordered a UNI-T 61D multimeter which I bought from EBay from a seller in Hong Kong. I watched a couple of video reviews online and this one is apparently very accurate and has all of the features I'll ever need.

Multimeters appear to be something that people have for life, so I thought I would buy a midrange one at a decent price.

Autostart service.sh and setting timezones on the Drobo-FS

Something that I have been to lazy to do on the Drobo-FS so far is set the timezone correctly as well as configure SABNZBin, Sickbeard and Couchpotato to automatically start when the device is restarted. Until now I had been manually restarting the services after power outs or when organising my server shelf :)

Thankfully one of my mates has written two guides on how to achieve this and the scripts are working fine.

DroboApps and Daemons
How to set the Time Zone on the Drobo-FS 

How much does a Sonos Connect:AMP (ZonePlayer 120) cost to run?

I've borrowed a Power-Mate Lite from a mate and have taken some readings to monitor Sonos power usage as I wasn't sure how much it would cost me to run three Sonos Connect:AMPs (ZP120) all year in-case it was worth considering put them on some sort of power timing device to turn them off overnight.

I'm on Red State energy at and have set the readings at 28 cents per kWH which is the "Summer step one" rate ex-GST.

Here are the readings of the Sonos players in an idle state connected via the WIFI bridge. I let the Sonos boot, and then reset the Power-Mate let it monitor the device for 10 minutes.

So just under $50 to run three Sonos players on idle for an entire year. Better than I expected.

Here are the Power-Mate readings streaming Absolute Classic Rock Radio over the WIFI bridge at half volume  with 8" Polk Audio Ceiling Speakers attached.

The meter was reset while the music was playing and run for about 5 minutes.

$23.78 Australian dollars a year at 27c per KWH (85.347kWh in a year). Cheaper than I thought really for playing music non-stop at a reasonable volume for a whole year.

I've also finally gotten around to repairing the damage to the ceiling in the kitchen after installing the kitchen speaker. I initially glued the gap with liquid nails and braced it with a piece of timber on a step ladder. After drying there was still a gap remaining on some parts of the crack which I then cleaned up with a Dremel (with a sander attachment) and then puttied up with remaining gaps white Wood Master which I got from Bunnings. I let the Wood Master dry and have since sanded it and it now just waiting to be painted.

Before

After
 (without painting)