CRT Repair 101

This morning I tried my hand at CRT repair and not only managed to avoid electrocution, but also revived the dead 22" monitor I had for the mame cabinet. It took a little bit of nerves to stick my screwdriver under the suction cup that covers the high tension anode to discharge the tube. The aligator clip that I had clipped onto the screwdriver snapped off just as I was starting to go under the insulator. The sound it made was exactly like a spark. Jump!

It took a bit of sweat to get the beast mounted, but it was well worth the effort. The picture is super clear, super bright, and really big. Niiiice. I still need to get the smoked glass and marquee.

The cat's favorite seat is JP's knitting bag.

GP Breaks His Arm

Last night GP broke his arm. It wasn't on the trampoline. It wasn't from swordfighting. It wasn't even from skatebarding. He broke it on a Barbie house.

He was running in the neighbor's basement and ran into a big barbie house and then fell on his wrist and broke both the radius and ulna. So far it has been exciting, but I think that at some point he will realize that he wants to play video games more than he wants to show off his arm.

Stupid Wind

Today we went out to shoot the rockets that we did not shoot yesterday at the cub scout launch. It was windy, but I found a field that gave us a full half-mile of recovery space.

At first it wasn't too bad. We shot a couple of low-power engines that arc'd over, but still landed downwind. I felt confident that we could shoot my big black rocket with an E engine, but even with rocks holding down the launch pad, the wind was too strong. The 1/8 launch rod was bending.

We gave up on the big rocket and went back to GP's little one with a large hole cut out of its small chute. I chased it a quarter mile. Stupid wind.

Cub Scout THOR Launch

We spent Saturday down near Pickrell with the cub scouts and THOR http://www.nerocketry.org/ shooting rockets up into the deep blue sky. THOR was having a contest to see who could get closest to 5500 feet. It's amazing seeing a 5-foot tall rocket blast straight up for a mile in only a few seconds.

In total, the scouts launched over 100 shots. We were able to see a dozen THOR high-power shots as well. The picture above is a huge (7+ feet tall) nitrous-oxide powered beast thundering off the pad.

By the time we left, even our streamer-recovery rockets were drifting 1/4-mile on B6-4 engines. We didn't shoot anything other than what the boys are holding here.

Tempest Marquee

Tonight I put together a DIY marquee for the Mame cabinet. I found a nice hi-res scan of a marquee and printed it out on the color laser printer at work. The colors are off, but it fills in the big void I had a the top of the cabinet and the backlight makes it look like a real arcade machine. All I have left is to get the glass (next payday) and then go thru everything and sanitize it. The wiring is a mess, the paint needs touching up, the control panel doesn't fit quite right, etc.
I have been playing Tempest every night, and I have to say that the original spinner kicks butt.

Original Tempest Control Panel

I found an original Tempest control panel on ebay for $30. It has everything, including the LED volcano switches and a spinner with bad bushings that goes brrrrrrrr when it spins. It's all in rough shape, but it really adds to the machine.

I spent this weekend converting the control panel over to USB. I built a circuit board around a Holtek 3D USB mouse IC. It should have been a no brainer, but the output from the spinner was goofy (the output would only go left, regardless of which way the encoder phases were connected). I had to build another circuit board to clean up the signal. Thank goodness for Radio Shack. I drove across town and bought a $.19 chip for $1.49 and burned $6 in fuel doing it.

I got the circuit working and the control panel is now semi-installed in the cabinet. I need to tidy things up a bit, but tempest is working better than ever. My homebrew spinner has too much inertia and the knob is too small. The original spinner is way better (and it's not made out of wood).

Birthday Legos

GP scored some nice bionicles. This is a spaceship/gun thing that has 700+ tiny parts.

CP got the republic gunship. It has over 1000 tiny pieces. The boys are almost to the point of being able to assemble these large kits on their own, but not quite.

CP's B-Day

CP opened a big gift on his actual birthday, and then had his party Friday night. JP pulled together a Star Wars theme that coincided perfectly with the premiere of the new Star Wars cartoon.

This is CP's big gift: a full-auto motorized nerf heavy machine gun. It was belt fed and could fire 3 rounds per second. It lasted until I got home that evening, and then some gears inside stripped out and JP took it back to Target. CP used all of his birthday funds to purchase some fancy Halo 3 action figures.

GP's B-Day Party

The Grammas came out for the boys' birthdays. We did GP's party at the skating rink. Everyone had a good time skating and being crazy.