For various reasons I've taken on the daunting task of building a full size astromech droid.  I haven't quite decided at this time if it's going to be a replica of the famous R2 or some other astromech from the Star Wars franchise.  Either way, it's going to force me to learn new things and work with various materials, many of which I have little to no previous experience.

Over the last few weeks I managed to bring together the parts necessary to build the dome logic displays. In the world of replica astromech droid builders, the Teeces are an array of boards and LED's controlled by an Arduino to reproduce the familiar logic displays mounted in the droid's dome.  The pcbs were from OSH Park, the leds from china, and the other components I ordered from Digikey. Here is a shot of the Teeces boards from OSH Park.

Last night I started adding the components to the rear logic display.  This required loading a bit of code up to an Arduino Pro Mini.  Then a few led driver chips were soldered to the main board and the Arduino was mounted on the back.  I started the process of adding the LED's to the board and testing each one. Everything was looking good, but I ran out of time.  It's a tedious task to add all these tiny LED's to the board and check each for polarity.  Hopefully tonight I can get them soldered in place.

More work on the multicades

I got bored with these jamma multicades.  It's been quite some time since I've done anything with them.  This weekend I picked up one of the control boards and tossed it on my drill press.  After making the button and joystick holes, I guess I was motivated enough to press on.

Here are a few pics of the progress.   As you can see the control panel looks nice.  I had the parts laying around from almost a year ago, so it was a simple matter of bolting everything in place and testing it out.

I tidied up the control panel wires and added a break connector.  A few zip ties later and it was looking nice and organized. 

For this project I ordered a Vision Pro LCD for the display.  The LED display allowed me to make the cabinet much shallower than a traditional arcade cabinet.  I think these cabinets will work very well for a home game room.  They are small enough to move around easily and have a small footprint.

For convenience I installed the service and test switches to the back of the machine at arms reach.  The power switch is also just to the top right of the back.  You can see in this photo I still have a bit of cleaning up to do with the cables.  Still it is all very straight forward.  All that is needed to play one of the thousands of early 80's jamma boards, is to remove the harness from the current board, and plug it in.

I've been hooked on playing Time Pilot on this game.  I'm not sure why, I never really liked it much back in the day. 

So that's it for now.  I plan to add a black paper bezel just underneath the glass to frame in the display nicely. Also the t-molding needs installed.  So far its looking nice, and it's great to see a clean new cabinet for once.