Fooblog

The scrapmame cabinet is getting to a functional level. Today I was able to play a game of asteroids, pacman and galaga on it.
All the buttons have been wired up to the controller using screw terminals (kroonsteentje) for easy (dis)assembly.

Galaga running on scrapmame

Before getting there I had to do some creative wiring, as it seems I cut some corners with wiring up the controller. A few separate ground-points were connected, however this was causing interesting signals on the analog joystick axes. A lot of trial-and-error later it seems I have clean inputs from all buttons and the digital joystick.

I still need to hook up the second stick (which will hopefully arrive from DX this week), some buttons (insert coin, start game) and a usb keypad (for misc buttons). A set of speakers should also arrive this week, allowing the scrapmame to make a decent amount of noise.

Next week I’ll probably fit in the PC (I’ve been using my laptop for testing so far) and then I’ll start on the launcher/menu interface.

I’ll try to add some more pictures of the inside of the cabinet later.

After the woodworking on the scrapmame it was time for the electronics.

The first bit was unsoldering/cutting the wires on the sacrificed PSX controller and then connecting new wires to the solder-pads

The yellow wires are for the direction buttons, white for the 4 fire-buttons and blue is the common ground.

After a long soldering session the result looked like this:

A few more solder-pads were connected to ground wires (or each-other) and the red wires connect to the shoulder-buttons and analog-stick buttons of the PSX. The 2 new yellow wires connect to ’start’ and ’select’.

This would give me a total of 16 buttons wired to a single PSX controller. On the mame cabinet this will translate to a sets of 4 directional buttons and 3 fire buttons for each player (2 players) and 2 remaining buttons for ’start’ or ‘insert coin’… I’m not too sure yet about what would be the ‘best’ combination.

Lastly, before calling it a night, I wired up the ground-connections on the joystick section, so I only need to bring 5 cables up to the stick ( and not 8 )

Next time I plan to connect all the wires to plugs that connect to the buttons (still need to buy the correct sized plugs) and joystick microswitches (which you can see in the background of the first picture)

At Revelation Space I have been doing some woodworking for a project I’m working on. I’m normaly the guy with two left hands when it comes to working with heavy machinery and old-skool hardware, but I must say I’m not doing too bad.
It helps that revspace has more then enough of the necessary tools (at home I only have a hammer and a screwdriver )

The project is a self-built Arcade cabinet, which at this time has been called ‘ScrapMAME’, as it’s been built completely out of scrap-materials.

I have built the frame and outsides of the cabinet from wood boards that were originally bolted onto the windows in the workshop, together with some wood beams that were still lying around the space.
The buttons and joystick have been ordered from DealExtreme, and the first batch has arrived. Hopefully my second shipment with the remaining parts will arrive soon.
I’m using this arcade stick, and these buttons from DX. The buttons will be wired to the pcb of an old PSX controller, which will be connected to a PSX->USB adapter.

2010/06/26: The buttons and joystick arrived, so I could finally drill the holes.

There is still lots to be done… which will be added as soon as I get to it ;P

It seems my mailserver has been bouncing mails this morning.
My spam filtering setup was broken somewhere in the virus-scanning phase, as clamav was reporting errors. This caused all mail to be rejected. This should now be fixed (at least for now, as I disabled the clamav plugin on pythonfilter).

Also, someone had hacked into my ICQ account (which I hardly use anymore) and spammed all my contacts for some russian site. The password on my ICQ account has been changed, so this should no longer be an issue either.

Sorry for causing this mess

Je kan je tegenwoordig afmelden voor het ontvangen van de papieren Telefoongids en Gouden Gids… Die antieke stapels papier zijn natuurlijk compleet niet meer van deze tijd, en ik kan me niet meer herinneren wanneer ik er voor het laatst eentje heb bekeken.

Het afmelden kan hier
Als je het formuliertje dan invult krijg je een mailtje, waarin o.a. de volgende text staat:

…
Denk aan het milieu voordat u deze e-mail uitprint.

Dit bericht is afkomstig van De Telefoongids BV en uitsluitend bestemd voor de geadresseerde. Dit bericht kan vertrouwelijke informatie bevatten. Als u dit bericht per abuis hebt ontvangen, dan wordt u verzocht de afzender te informeren en het bericht en eventuele bijlagen te vernietigen.
…

Tja… dat komende van het bedrijf dat heel Nederland jaarlijks een pak papier van 5cm stuurt, dat in 95% van de gevallen direct weer naar het oud papier gaat.

Just like about every year…

We’re going with at least 8 people from #eth0, so that should be quite entertaining.

After having been frustrated for 2 weeks about the performance of my new raid-array, and spending an evening trying to pinpoint the issue, something that hasn’t happened to me in the 20 years I’ve been working with computers occurred. The magic smoke of a device was released upon connecting it.

I had pinpointed the performance-issue to a single disk in the array, which was acting weird. It would be detected as 500GB a single time, and as 1500GB the next. It’s read performance on sequential reads would fluctuate between ~80MB/sec (as the other disks) and < 1M/sec. Sometimes sticking at the snail-pace for minutes before going back to 80M/sec. After removing the disk from the array and trying it on a different controller it worked again for a while, but I cheered too soon, as the performance dropped again after a few minutes.

I finally decided to connect the disk to a second machine, so I could run a long performance-test on it without impacting my normal use on the system it came from. So I plugged in the SATA and power-cables, turned the 2nd computer on, and was greeted by a sizable puff of gray smoke coming from the PCB of the drive. A nasty smell accompanied the smoke and signaled that this troublesome disk had spinned it’s last cycles.

There is no directly visible damage or burns, as the smoke came from the side of the PCB that’s facing the disk, the smell probably largely coming from the foam that separates the disk housing and the PCB.

Naturally the disk was no longer recognized by any system from this point forward… so I have to run back to the store (again) tomorrow to replace the disk (the 2nd in the batch of 4 I bought 2 weeks ago).

Oh well…. let’s just hope this is the first and last time this happens ;P

Yesterday I went to see the Laibach/Juno Reactor concert at Metropool Hengelo. Laibach was nice, but we were really there for Juno Reactor, who gave a perfect show. The entire room was dancing along to the great music.

12►

And some vids:

• Video 1.3gp
• Video 2.3gp
• Video 3.3gp
• Video 4.3gp

Deze week kreeg in onderstaande brief in de mailbox…

Beste inschrijver,

In mei van dit jaar zijn een aantal enthousiaste initiatiefnemers in Zoetermeer gestart om de
belangstelling voor glasvezel te peilen. Veel inwoners uit Zoetermeer lieten weten graag een
aansluiting te willen. Op dit moment hebben zich circa tien procent van de totale
huishoudens van Zoetermeer zich ingeschreven bij Fiberpoint. Dit is zoals u weet nog niet
genoeg om onderhandelingen met dienstenleveranciers en vervolgens met een
investeerder op te starten. Daarnaast zijn wij op zoek naar ambassadeurs op wijk en/of
straatniveau in Zoetermeer ten einde een hoger inschrijvingspercentage te kunnen behalen.
Wij zullen op korte termijn alle kritische opmerkingen aangaande onze website daar waar
mogelijk verwerken en aanpassen. Voorts zijn wij van plan om een informatie avond te
houden in wijkcentra of wellicht het stadhuis te Zoetermeer. Waar het in essentie om gaat,
is dat men er zich van bewust moet worden dat als er een open netwerk in Zoetermeer
komt, u niet meer verplicht bent om bij de aangewezen dienstenleverancier uw diensten af
te nemen. Meerdere dienstenleveranciers kunnen hun diensten aanbieden op het open
netwerk, omdat ze hier vrijelijk toegang verkrijgen. U kunt zelf bepalen wat u wilt en bij wie
u dat wilt.
Een open netwerk, ondergebracht in de Stichting Fiberpoint Zoetermeer waardoor de
inwoners van Zoetermeer de “baas” zijn over het netwerk, maakt Wijk TV mogelijk, maar
ook tal van andere zaken, omdat de zeggenschap dan ligt bij de abonnee en NIET de
eigenaar cq exploitant. Als men zich hiervan bewust is, gaat het eigenlijk nog maar om één
ding, namelijk:

“wilt u hetzelfde als u nu heeft, alleen sneller en voordeliger?”

Indien u het bewoners initiatief wilt ondersteunen en hiermee actief in uw wijk aan de slag
wilt, laat het ons dan weten, immers buren nemen onderling sneller barrières weg dan een
“vreemde eend in de bijt”. Laten we gezamenlijk een signaal afgeven dat de gevestigde orde
van kabelexploitanten op haar grondvesten doet schudden, zonder onze inzet zal er geen
glasvezelnetwerk in Zoetermeer worden aangelegd en blijft alles bij het oude voor in ieder
geval de komende 20 jaar.

Wij houden u op de hoogte van de ontwikkelingen.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Namens Team Fiberpoint Zoetermeer

Eric Vos

Ze hebben nog een lange weg te gaan, en het beoogde doel-percentage lijkt mij extreem hoog, zeker gezien de recente promotie-activiteiten van Ziggo die een flink tegen-offensief zijn gestart om zo te proberen FttH zo lang mogelijk te blokkeren.

So, I finally replaced by aging Nokia E70 with a brand new HTC Hero White Android phone. The touchscreen keyboard is still something I have to get used to, and the batterylife the last few days has been limiting (but I play a lot with it… but I must remember to recharge it when possible).
I’ve installed quite a few applications on it, and have now also gotten my voipbuster account working on it and have made some voip test-calls to and from my other voip numbers. I’ve also gotten voip to work over the telfort 3G connection I’m using, and will probably be using a lot of that in the future.
Other notable apps I will enjoy a lot are:

Google Skymaps. Uses the compass and position sensors so display a star-map of the area that you are pointing at
Google places. Should list all kinds of local restaurants, bars, banks and gas stations… but how well this works in the Netherlands is yet to be seen.
Twidroid. My current twitter-app of choice, Peep just didn’t pull it.

Some stuff I figured out, but that wasn’t too obvious initially:

• Press ‘home’ for 2-3 seconds and release for a list of running applications and click them to switch to them
• Telfort network is always considered to be ‘roaming’, because it doesn’t really exist anymore, and I am technically on the KPN network.
• …