I spent yesterday afternoon running out to an
#electronics store I've never been to before. Quite a distance away from home. It was about 2pm and the place was closing at 4pm. Everyone else running out to get emergency booze for New Year's Eve according to the Russian Uber driver. I'm running out for emergency electronics because I'm that kind of dude, I suppose.
I went out to Addison Electronique in St. Michel -
https://addison-electronique.com/en/ - and it was such a really cool place to go. I'm not usually someone that does much electronics work so I don't really get much of a chance to go to these kinds of places. I've always been interested in working on hardware and just never really got around to it. This is part of the reason why getting my
#Chewlix (#Vewlix clone)
#arcade machine was interesting to me, to spend some time learning and discovering how things work on the inside.
The store itself was quite large, everything from boxes and boxes and walls of every little transistor and switch you could possibly imagine alongside from consumer electronics and car audio stuff. So much stuff that I spent most of my time just simply attempting to find what exactly I was looking for. Unfortunately, I felt like I was out of my depth. I had not done enough research into what I really needed, so I didn't want to bother sales people with my needs. I instead wandered through the aisles looking at everything and seeing what they had, which was a lot of fun on its own. Funny how the creative juices start flowing when you are in a place filled with possibilities like that.
Came out of the place with a solder station, a crimping tool with something like 270 crimping connectors of various sizes and shapes, a roll of 22AW wire that I'll use for rewiring my arcade buttons and sticks, some nylon ties for cable management, 100 feet of speaker wire. Almost bought a PC case fan as I believe the one on the bottom of the machine right now has had a blade knocked out of it and is now making some vibration sound because of it, but wasn't too sure about the measurements so decided to do that later.
So why I am doing this? I'm replacing the speakers in my machine and redoing the wiring as the original four speakers are wired up in a daisy chain in mono aaaaand I really want stereo sound. Already replaced the amp with one that was recommended. Took me a bit of time as you need to disassemble a lot of the machine to get to them, but got the top pair of speakers replaced and was able to verify that I'm getting stereo
#sound. I have not done the bottom set yet as I'm unsure if I can just pop the wires for those
#speakers into the same spring clips the top speakers are using (one set for left, one set for right) and while it sounds like it would be okay, I felt like it would be smart to do some more research first.
I ordered some Brooks Zero-Pi fighting boards to replace my current zero delay no name brand USB encoders. I had previously bought the Brooks Ultimate Fight Boards (recommended by
#fgc) and sent them back as I was getting crazy amounts of input lag. I recently discovered that it was because the USB hub they were plugged into was unpowered, so I've since replaced that hub with a powered hub and no more lag. Decided to get the cheaper Zero-Pi boards as the UFB boards do not default to PC when turned on so you would need to hold a button when starting up your PC for them to be usable and I don't have time for that kind of shit. I know I won't have the same issue on the Zero-Pi boards.
Quite happy that the work was successful and I now have stereo sound. The controls rewiring will happen on Tuesday when the Brooks boards get in. I'm going to check to see if I've got a case fan locally otherwise I'll pick up a Noctua on Amazon, I guess. I suppose the one last thing to do after that would be rewiring the coin mech back to the select button so I can insert coins back into the machine... and I guess also wiring the internal service/test buttons that I don't use at all right now.
Anyways, I'm having fun. Hope you are too, especially if you read all this babble.
Jay 