Day 5 Drawing and Pondering

Half the day was spent at the pictures watching Paranorman, so only a small amount of time was allowed for today.

In brief I drew round the cabinet for the baton placements, drew the likely monitor placement using the family as pretend game players and did research into button layouts, positions, etc.

The website SlagCoin (great name) has so much information it's just unreal. Anyway I settled on a standard six button layout with offset first column buttons (I hope they don't mind me embedding their picture).

I decided that a door would be most agreeable to provide easy access (well, I always did from the beginning) but I'm now putting it at the back to make the front look nicer. Given the side panels are the deepest points of the whole cabinet (the rest fits inside leaving a lip) the door has to be inside.


Armed with a few spare kitchen hinges this is what I came up with as the solution.

In order to fit inside you need to double up the hinge mount on the inside of the door and as it happens the same 18mm MDF seems to fit nicely. The hole for the hinge (33mm diameter if I recall) was done using a router, otherwise using a drill bit (assuming I had one the right size) would probably puncture a hole through the other side. Imagine the doubled up wood is the left/right cabinet side and the wood with the drawing on it is the back where the door opens.

When drawing round to see where the batons went I decided to leave a 18mm lip around the front visible areas and round the top/back just a few millimetres to give as much space as possible inside and for the marquee. I fear I've not made the marquee big enough and probably should have taken 50mm from the height of the screen and increased the marquee by this much. Similarly I should really should use thinner MDF for the marquee and speaker housing toincrease height but I'm going to use what I've got and probably regret it later.

I've spent a few hours pondering and placing the monitor and decided that I need to compromise between size of control panel, height of monitor and space for the speakers.

I think what will happen is the control panel will be longer than I expected (14 inches,  35cm), the monitor slightly too low and too far back and not really enough space for speakers, but we'll see. I'll set out the control panel layout tonight to check the size length. This isn't an issue as I can always chop off an inch from the front.

The problem is when you extend a line from where the control panel fits (zoom in on the drawing and you'll see it) you need to intersect that with the monitor line and doing so produced a really large control panel or a really high monitor bezel. One solution is to add an angled cover to make up and maybe mount some buttons (like the picture to the right). However I don't really like it.

The image to the left is much more in keeping with what I had in mind and so I had to tweak things until I got it right. Curiously the cabinet below (Zombie Cabinet) is 660mm wide and 320mm deep and they've managed to fit a trackball and spinner, so when I draw mine up I'll see if it'll fit (though those two will cost upwards of £120 so it's out of this year's budget) and if they do I'll buy the I-Pac controller that supports trackball/spinners.

Tonight's job is to draw the panel layout to see if the depth is looking daft and/or can fit a trackball comfortably and figure out if I can fit my pc speakers, or whether I want to buy a subwoofer. Round car speakers look the best I think but PC speakers are usually rectangular. I think maybe what I'll do is fit the speakers inside the cabinet and create a hole big enough for the sound to go through and cover with round car speaker grills. I'll just have to remove the volume/bass/treble, extend the wire and locate the volume somewhere unobtrusive and easy to fine like beneath the control panel. Though I've no idea whether the knobs will travel (i.e. if the components to make the knob rotate are part of the speakers).