Monday, March 17, 2008

phase One - "Test Box" Is Alive!!!!

After borrowing some tools (soldering iron, ratcheting crimpers and wire strippers - Thx Brad) I could now go about hooking up my RGB drives and buttons. After mounting my LD-Wiz on the box I set about wiring up the RGB drives. Taking the advice I found on several sites/posts I decided to "tin" the wires, which basicly keeps all the strands of wire together as well as giving you some added thickness. The add thickness is really nice since the RGB wires are about 28 gauge and kind of hard to get secure in the screw terminals of the LED-Wiz without "tinning".

After hooking up two of the LED's I decided to test and see if I'm remotely doing this correctly:


Success!!!! I'm pretty sure I can hook up the rest now!! Tinning the wire turned out to be pretty easy. Only melted one test wire, so i think that's pretty good!

After getting the rest wired up I twisted the 7 power wires together and soldered them together. That worked pretty good for putting them all in securely. Any more than 7 though and I think I'll have to A) get the power from the PC instead of USB and B) chain the wires together differently because 7 soldered together seems kind of like the max. Luckily, I'm only using 7 right now. Anyhow, hooked up the rest and they look AWESOME!!

2 comments:

Paul Pangrazzi said...

Those illuniated buttons kick arse.
Are you configuring them to change color on activation (example: some are red, some are blue, etc.... like the original game button colors) or are you simply illuminating them in the same color (an elegant take, maybe?)

Jexter said...

I think a little of both actually. I'm thinking some sort of elegant illumination while in standby. When you select a game it will highlight the buttons being used (And actually say the function of each as well!) and yes original colors. The thing I'm not decided on yet is while you are cycling through the game collection, I may also light up the buttons used (as well as the number of possiblel players) but that would kind of turn off the "elegant" look durring navigation.

It will take some time but a lot of people have tons of it done already and they share the config files :)