HE Lives!

The FSM is coming to life on the Tempest machine! I think HE will look much better than the original demons.

The side art is going SLOW. As usual, I underestimated the effort. The good news is that I'm making progress. In another week I should have most of one side complete.

RAmen

Mame Cabinet Paint

Today I tore down the Mame cabinet and relocated it into the basement. It's too cold in the garage to play or work. The 22" monitor needs to be remounted more securely. JP doesn't like how it's mounted now. She doesn't like it so much that she offered to buy me a new 22" LCD display. Where was this offer before I jumped into CRT repair? Now that I have the CRT working, there's no way I'm going to abandon it.

I have been searching desparately for som hi-res side art pictures of a Tempest cabinet. The best I found is 500 x 1000 pixels (0.5 megapixels). I tweaked it a bit so that it just shows the lines between different colors and printed it out full-size. It came out 5 sheets wide by 8 sheets tall. I trimmed the sheets and taped them together then used JP's steam iron to transfer the ink onto the side panel. It almost worked as I had hoped. The lines are barely visible, and the paper stuck to the wood in some spots.

I got the orange outlines painted tonight. It's going to be a challenge, but I think I will be able to pull it off. The original design has several mean-looking demons in the middle. I'm going to try to swap them out for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Webelos Naturalist

Saturday, I took CP out to Pioneers Park to earn his Naturalist pin. The park has several programs tailored to the scout program requirements. We had a guide that showed us all the natural things outside. I was really impressed with his knowledge.

Last weekend, it was nearly 80 with blue skies. This weekend it was in the 30's with a solid 25 mph wind. We dressed for it, but I would still prefer something warmer, sunnier, or less windy for a three hour walk in the woods.

The boys got baclavas this year. They wear them everywhere. I'm surprised that they don't sleep with them.

Windless Rocket Morning

This morning we had blue skies, frost (supposed to hit 75 today), and absolutely no wind. I loaded up all of our rockets and the boys and headed to the outskirts of town (a mile away) to launch our big E-powered rocket.

Hobbytown has all of their Aerotech rocket motors on sale for 50% off. I picked up an E-15. Wow! I'm ready for some more big rockets. This one is about 5 feet tall, and it flies really well. It's so big, you can see it during the entire flight. The E engine makes up for the weight, and it probably goes as high as our little rockets.

The E engine doesn't roar like an H or J, but it does shoot out a nice flame for quite a while. We ended up shooting this one three times. On the last shot, it returned to the pad, and I was able to catch it before it hit. Niiiiice.

We also launched two stages of the Comanche-3. The booster used a D-12, which popped 2 of the three fins off when it staged. For some reason, the rocket curved from vertical when it cleared the pad, and it landed half a mile away, even with a streamer recovery.

What a fun day!

Halloween 2008

This year, the boys didn't do much for Halloween. GP recycled his A. Skywalker costume, and CP put together his army clothes and went as a soldier. We toured the 'hood with our neighbors and their kids. The best house was GT's, where we all got Budweiser products. The best costume was our next door neighbor, who went as that maverick, Sarah Palin.

Gimpy Hairwash

With his cast on, GP cannot wash his own hair, so he gets the same treatment as the dog.

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.