Sensors for homemade pad

TehMonkay · Post by **TehMonkay** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 5:59 pm

If you go to home depot you can get like a 20' X 10' roll of sheet metal for like, $8, its called flashing I do believe, in the roofing section.

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Sun Jul 24, 2005 1:08 am

actually I remember hearing that flashing term before.... are you sure it's 20' x 10' and not 20" by 10"? if it is 20' by 10' I'm goin out there tomorrow

Right now the person I was working on the pad with has it somewhere (I think) and we need to find it again..... it's been about a year since we've seen it.

TehMonkay · Post by **TehMonkay** » Sun Jul 24, 2005 10:58 pm

Well, It's more like 5' X 15', I had to roll it out down the whole floor and all.

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 10:02 am

5' x 15' is still massive for that price! mmm I will have to make a pitstop there soon

Zash · Post by **Zash** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 2:48 am

Green Tea wrote:That's actually fairly similar to what I did... but I did a little differently... I used adhesive spray to get the metal to stick to the acrylic arrow. I attempted to draw a diagram of my pad here it is:

IMAGE

the screws I actually screwed into the weather stripping to try to make it have less compression. The problem I had was with the screws being pushed down and stripping (dirty whores(sorry random guttermind tangent)). I see your design provides more support... I will probably experiment with sometime similar to your idea next.

One thing though... did you attach the ground wire to the sheet metal above it, or did you use the screws like I did?

PS: yes I know I draw like a 3 year old... I don't like paint and I didn't feel like putting it in autocad

I originally experimented with the concept of having one screw as the positive and one screw as the ground and having the sheet metal connect the 2 screws. I found that I got a HORRIBLE response that way however. What I'm doing in my current configuration is hooking the positive wire to the screws and then connecting the ground to the sheet metal *via one of the screws that holds it to the wood*. I've found that doing this will increase the response of the arrow A LOT *for me at least*.

I do kinda like your idea of screwing the screws directly into the weather stripping. I might have to experiment with your weather stripping idea a bit. That design would probably give you the ability to tweak your sensors a LOT more than my design. It's kinda hard to get my sensors to work perfectly at the moment.

So far I have 2 of my arrows *the up and right arrow* working the way that I'd like for them to. My down arrow is still using my old/shitty sensor design and my left arrow is only sporting 2 of my new sensors

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:41 am

Whoooo almost a year bump, but with news... I found and considering ordering these momentary push-button switches for $0.39 a pop

I think that they're decent quality, I just worry a bit about their durability... Nevertheless I just need to find my casing for my home pad. I'll let everyone know how it works out if I do end up getting these. (I am also going to be rebuilding the original base to the pad to accomidate these changes.)

EDIT: I can't seem to find the original top to the DDR pad that I built, so I might just rebuild from scratch... oh well. I think I can build alot cheaper this time... I'm using a roll of Aluminum sheet metal 12" x 10' and 4 acrylic squares ~11"x11". I'm still looking for a good deal on plywood but currently everything will cost about $36

FLAKK · Post by **FLAKK** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 11:09 am

What I did was buy a small blank PCB board for each button and a sheet of aluminum mesh for the ground. Since the ground is the same for each button, I made that sheet huge. I weaved stripped copper wire through the mesh and soldered leads to the PCB boards. There was carpet padding to seperate the boards from the mesh. This thing lasted a long time, the only problem was the aluminum mesh was tearing apart and causing the buttons to stick. If I had the money to buy a second set of PCB boards, I'd put those on the bottom for ground. But they can get expensive and the only place I saw them was at Radio Shack.

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:57 pm

FLAKK wrote:What I did was buy a small blank PCB board for each button and a sheet of aluminum mesh for the ground. Since the ground is the same for each button, I made that sheet huge. I weaved stripped copper wire through the mesh and soldered leads to the PCB boards. There was carpet padding to seperate the boards from the mesh. This thing lasted a long time, the only problem was the aluminum mesh was tearing apart and causing the buttons to stick. If I had the money to buy a second set of PCB boards, I'd put those on the bottom for ground. But they can get expensive and the only place I saw them was at Radio Shack.

That's a great idea, the only thing I would worry about is the possibility of the PCB snapping. the carpet padding is a good idea... I've used 1/4" weather stripping but the thing bothered the crap out of me because I always got too much compression. mmm only 2 more weeks until I can concentrate fully on this...

FLAKK · Post by **FLAKK** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:50 pm

Those PCBs won't snap. I tried to crack one by setting it on a small rock and running over it with my Jeep. The board survived.

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 6:47 pm

FLAKK wrote:Those PCBs won't snap. I tried to crack one by setting it on a small rock and running over it with my Jeep. The board survived.

You have my trust now

Arka · Post by **Arka** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 6:55 pm

Green Tea wrote:
FLAKK wrote:Those PCBs won't snap. I tried to crack one by setting it on a small rock and running over it with my Jeep. The board survived.
You have my trust now

That's only because you're not an innocent, defenseless little circuit board.

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:08 pm

Arka wrote:
Green Tea wrote:
FLAKK wrote:Those PCBs won't snap. I tried to crack one by setting it on a small rock and running over it with my Jeep. The board survived.
You have my trust now
That's only because you're not an innocent, defenseless little circuit board.

I'm sure you've done worse! well maybe not to the physical circuit board... but perhaps some slaughtered diodes/ICs/or capacitors... Granted I am not innocent either... or innocent to my graphics card fan when I accidently plugged it in backwards while the case was standing up with a pair of pliers.

Arka · Post by **Arka** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 8:56 pm

Green Tea wrote:
Arka wrote:
Green Tea wrote: You have my trust now
That's only because you're not an innocent, defenseless little circuit board.
I'm sure you've done worse! well maybe not to the physical circuit board... but perhaps some slaughtered diodes/ICs/or capacitors... Granted I am not innocent either... or innocent to my graphics card fan when I accidently plugged it in backwards while the case was standing up with a pair of pliers.

I'm actually remarkably good at maintaining the integrity of magic smoke chambers. Though there was that time I pressed a main board too close to an aux board (this was on a very small rover, so space was quite limited) and wound up shorting the two together in multiple places. Amazingly, only my microcontroller fried.

How did you plug in your graphics card fan with a pair of pliers?

Green Tea · Post by **Green Tea** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 9:35 pm

Arka wrote: actually remarkably good at maintaining the integrity of magic smoke chambers. Though there was that time I pressed a main board too close to an aux board (this was on a very small rover, so space was quite limited) and wound up shorting the two together in multiple places. Amazingly, only my microcontroller fried.

That's very impressive

I once fried around 18 diodes in about 5 minutes. (I didn't have a multimeter and all I had were some 1.5v batteries and some wires and I wanted to know what the voltage on them was... it was really funny.)

Arka wrote:How did you plug in your graphics card fan with a pair of pliers?

well it has those two prongs, and I didn't want to take it out of the case, the way it's situated I couldn't really get my hand in there (darn cramped cases) so I just got my trusty needlenose pliers. and to be honest I used a screwdriver to help push it in.... it's rather hard to do that... ugh it's past my bedtime...