I was sitting at the computer, and a mail truck I did hear
When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a bunch of stuff for the arcade.

First up, my Centipede keychain from Oleszak Creative:

I haven’t decided, but I think I’ll probably put my Centipede keys on this and hang it on the coin door. The packaging for this was very cool, but I forgot to take a pic of it before I opened it. You can see the packaging and more examples of these keychains here.

Next, some DK art from ArcadeShop.com:

The thing stuck to the marquee in that first pic is the instruction card for under the bezel. I’d love to see these with the masking removed, but I’m not going to remove it until I have restored the Popeye cabinet that these are going to go in. I have all the art I need now for this. The only parts I need are a DK PCB, joystick, and buttons.

Finally….a “Tokens” marquee:

The plan for this is to make it into a backlit sign to put over my token machine.

That is all. Go back to watching cat videos on YouTube.

Hello there. Back in February, I got me some Pac-Man skates. Alas, they were missing laces. I figured it would be cool to put some Pac-Man laces in them, and finally found some on eBay:

Behold:

I’m heading out now for my morning skate to Dunkin’ Donuts…wish me luck!

I love surprises. Most people do, unless it’s one like “I’m going to stab you!!!!” or a fortune cookie that reads “food poisoned…you go bye bye”.

Well…this was one of those GOOD surprises:

I forgot that I won this on eBay. It’s an original artwork proof for the Aladdin Pac-Man lunch box made in 1982. I was surprised to see it stored inside an Aladdin envelope. Here’s a description of it from the eBay auction:

Up for bid is an original paper proof sheet for Aladdin Industries 1982 PAC-MAN lunchbox - front, back, and sideband. It is in perfect condition, bright and shiney, unfaded, no rips or tears. It is made of the same type of material that a poster is made of.  It measures 22X32. It is dated 3/22/82. It has been folded to fit into a normal size file drawer. I found a bunch of these folded and in a file, I will be listing them over the next few days. This item has probably been in that file for 26years.  Please ignore the camera glare in the photos - it looks like there is some fading - there is not. This item would look great framed.

More pics:

I guess this was a proof to get the artwork approved by someone (Namco?) or maybe just to get it approved internally before releasing the final product. I’ve never seen one of these before. The seller also had a Dragon’s Lair one that sold for a little more than this one. If you know more about this, please comment.

Hey there. Hope you had a good Easter yesterday. If you aren’t into Easter, then I hope you had a good Sunday.

My wife is divorced. She had a bunch of her stuff in the attic at her ex-husband’s house and it sat there for years. We went to pick it up on Saturday,  and she found this in one of the boxes:

She won it at a fair of some sort back in the 80s. It’s obviously not licensed, but I like it. We are going to put it up in the arcade. I *may* get a new frame for it though. This frame is pretty ugly and crooked.  It reminds me of Owen Wilson’s nose. Maybe he won said nose at a fair in the 80s? Now THAT would be a coincidence!

The title above should be said as Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein.

Howdy kids! I have good news to report regarding the programming of my LED sign project.

The folks at EvilMadScientist.com and LadyAda.net teamed up to help me resolve the issue I was having with my USBTinyISP programmer, and it’s now working perfectly. If I understand it right, the 1.5K resistors were not allowing enough voltage to go to the buffer chip. I removed them (R6 and R7) and replaced them with wires:

After I did that, it worked great. I then took some code that “bbum” posted on the EvilMadScientist.com boards (thanks!), and modified it to alternate rows 16 and 17 to get my 2 frame animation as follows:

lightLine24(lineDuration);
lightLine23(lineDuration);

if (RowOnCount++ < 75) {

     // frame 1 animation
     lightLine16(lineDuration);

     //lines below say “EAT ME”….makes them flash on and off with the animation
     lightLine22(lineDuration);
     lightLine21(lineDuration);
     lightLine20(lineDuration);
     lightLine19(lineDuration);
     lightLine18(lineDuration);

} else if (RowOnCount < 150) {
     // frame 2 animation
     lightLine17(lineDuration);
} else {
     RowOnCount = 0;
}

lightLine15(lineDuration);
lightLine14(lineDuration);
lightLine13(lineDuration);
lightLine12(lineDuration);
lightLine11(lineDuration);
lightLine10(lineDuration);
lightLine9(lineDuration);
lightLine8(lineDuration);
lightLine7(lineDuration);
lightLine6(lineDuration);
lightLine5(lineDuration);
lightLine4(lineDuration);
lightLine3(lineDuration);
lightLine2(lineDuration);
lightLine1(lineDuration);
lightLine0(lineDuration);


You can download the full source code for this here.

Here’s a new video of the sign:

As you can see, I decided to flash the “EAT ME” text in sync with the animation. Here’s a pic of the sign as it looks standing in the arcade:

I feel like making another one now.

I received my USBTinyISP AVR programmer kit from LadyAda.net / AdaFruit.com to program the AVR chip in the LED sign I’ve been working on. Here’s what I got:

There were all sorts of cool little thing-a-ma-whats-its inside:

I put all those parts in a pillow case, along with a spool of solder and my hot soldering iron and swung it around my head about 40 times. Here’s what I ended up with:

Here it is after putting it in it’s case:

I installed the software for it, and Windows detected it. It lights up all purty like when you plug it in, but I can’t get the damn thing to actually communicate with the AVR chip on the LED sign board. I keep getting an “initialization failed” error when I try to run “make install” from a dos prompt to actually write to the AVR chip.

I was up until about 2am last night messing with it. I’ll keep plugging away trying to figure out what the deal is and will report back here when I figure it out OR when I’ve smashed it back into tiny little bits with a sledgehammer.

This is just a quick update regarding my last post. I did the mockup for my sign using Photoshop, which took forever. I just found this online app that makes it much easier!

http://www.destituteagenda.com/peggy_planner/

CAUTION…LONG (but cool?) POST WARNING!

I mentioned on my birthday (2/26) that my wife got me a cool project to work on. While it’s not 100% done, I have enough done to talk about it. I’m glad, because I’ve been dying to write about this!

Here’s what I got:

It’s an LED pegboard sign project from EvilMadScientist.com. It’s basically a much cooler version of light bright. Get your kit here! It’s designed to be highly “hackable”. It has a microcontroller that you can reprogram if you have the hardware and software for it (which they explain on their site). Supposedly the way it’s designed, it’s possible (if you reprogram it) to do simple animation by turning entire rows on and off as you see fit. It’s not possible, however, to address individual LEDs separately.

How did my wife know I would love this? Maybe she’s psychic! OR….maybe I told her to buy it for me. I never do that, but this was too cool and I needed it badly so I dropped a hint for this one well in advance.

She got me pink, blue, and green 10mm LEDs from the same place that sold the circuit board kit. She also got me red and yellow LEDs from this place. After following the instructions (which were pretty simple), I had the board wired up and ready for LEDs. I stuck a couple of each color in to see what they would look like:

They are pretty hard to get a good picture of, and they look much better in person (just like me).

I had a lot of design ideas in mind, and it took me forever to decide what to put on the sign. I settled on this, which I mocked up in Photoshop:

If you need it, here’s the layered Photoshop file you can use to make your mockup.

Here’s a still of it lit up:

It looks better from further away, but the picture wouldn’t come out from a distance. If you like, get up out of your chair and step back about 30 feet from your monitor to get the full effect. (OMG! You’re doing it aren’t you!? HAH!).

The yellow is brighter in person…like I said - it’s ridiculously hard to photograph. I ended up having to order more blue LEDs, and some white ones which I got here. The white LEDs came in today and I soldered them all in. I’m not happy with the result. They blend in too much with the blue and don’t stand out enough. I’ve decided to remove them so the sign will end up looking like the image above with one small twist which is best demonstrated in this short video:

Now, I know what your thinking…you can’t reprogram it to make individual LEDs do your bidding. How did I do that then, your asking yourself? I’ll tell you if you promise to keep it a secret.

First, some honesty here. I didn’t actually reprogram the microcontroller yet. I plan on doing so when the USBTinyISP controller kit arrives that I ordered. What you are seeing is a complete sham, and I feel pretty bad about tricking you like this. My wife is pushing this microswitch button on and off in the darkness while I’m working the camera:

Here’s the logic behind this. The microcontroller on the board is setup to scan through all the rows on the board, turning them on and off in succession. Only one row is ever lit at any given time, but because it happens so fast your eyes see what look like a still image containing multiple rows of lights. It’s possible to rewrite the code to turn the rows on longer, shorter, in any order you want, to the beat of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, etc…

So, I figured you could just hack the board and wire the lights that I want to change via 30AWG wire jumpers to 2 unused rows. Then, I should be able to program those “unused” rows to control my animation. Here’s the rat’s nest on the back of the board that I managed to accomplish this with:

Only the last 2 rows of LEDs on the ghost image change. I started by removing the 2 resistors on the left side of the board that are connected to the two bottom rows of blue LEDs so those 2 rows were completely off when the sign was turned on.

Then, I made this image in Photoshop to help me keep track of which LEDs were lit when:

I made it by turning one of the sprite images yellow, and blending it on top of the other blue one to make green where they overlap. Green pixels are on in both frames. Blue are on in the first frame, and yellow in the second. I connected all the “green” pixel LEDs to the row directly above. Then, I wired frame 1 LEDs to the first empty row below the ghost (row #16), and frame 2 LEDs to the second (row #17). I had to cut traces on the back of the board to keep only the LEDs I wanted wired to the rows I was working with. It was pretty tricky but I got it by trial and error.

In order to test the wiring, I pulled one leg of each of the resistors feeding rows 16 and 17 out of the board, and soldered temporary wires to them:

I soldered two more wires to the pads that those legs belonged in. The two resistor ends then connected to common (ground) on the microswitch. One pad was then soldered to the NO (normally open) terminal, and the other to the NC (normally closed) terminal on the microswitch. This allows one row to be connected when you push the button, and the opposite row to be connected when you release it - alternating the rows.

My USBTinyISP programmer kit should be here in a few days. When I get it animated (without the wife behind the curtain clicking that button), I’ll post the source code in case you want to make one for yerself.