(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 7: Ben Heck Home Tour

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 02:04:58 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 2:04:58 AM

The Ben Heck show is brought to you by element 14, the electronic community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. Use voucher code “BENHECK” until December 31^st at store checkout to save up to 15% on select items.

In the year 2000, Ben Heckendorn built his first mod.

“Ben: We can rebuild it smaller, better, portable.”

Since then, he has continued his work helping those in need with creating new projects. If you’ve got an idea you’d like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

“Ben: Welcome back, on today’s episode we will be taking a closer look at the world of Ben Heckendorn - which is me. This includes building some prototypes, going to buy a pinball machine with friends, and also a tour of my home and shop. Now, some of my collections may shock and confuse you but you will just have to hang in there. However, it will be tempered by the fact we will be doing a demonstration of the portable work-bench and the X-Box 360 laptop. Let’s get in there.”

(Knocking)

“Ben: Welcome to your doom. This is the Ben Heck home tour, come on in camera person. I’ll get the door. We are going to show the amazing, awesome trinkets and things that I have laying around. Here is a Bill Paxton pinball machine that I built earlier this year, 2010. It is by far the most complicated thing I have ever built. You can look this up on my site, benheck.com - Bill Paxton pinball. There is actually quite a few videos of how it was made on YouTube - so a lot of information, pretty well-detailed. Basically a pinball machine, not my last pinball machine. And that score is still there, that was at the Midwest Gaming Classic - there was a guy there named Mark who looked like Michael Bay.

I remember that because I saw him again in Chicago at the Pinball Expo. He got the high score, 148 million. So, a fun fact. Here is my NeoGeo. I built this about 5 years ago. I was a big fan of the NeoGeo multi-arcade system back in 1990 when it came out. I couldn’t afford it back then, because I was 14. So, I built this one with the joysticks - it comes apart in two pieces. There is actually a seam right here, so you can lift off the top half and separate it from the bottom so it is easier to move.”

“Ben: Here is my crappy movie collection. I love bad movies, so I have like Leprechaun, two copies of Batman & Robin, Black Sheep, Tank Girl, Johnny Mnemonic, Bats, Wild Wild West, The Avenger’s. Wait, do I have 3 copies of Batman - how many copies of Batman do I have? Okay, just 2. This movie is terrible, The Avenger’s - Sean Connery is dressed up as a polar bear. He is like ‘I control the weather, now’. I was right - as I continue to self-diagnose myself as Obsessive Compulsive, Spider Man 2, Spider Man 2 director’s cut, Spider Man 2 on Blue-Ray. Hey, it’s a great movie - Doc Oc is awesome in it.

I can probably do away with one and still be feared. However, not all of my stuff is completely pointless as three copies of Spider Man 2, which is like 6 copies. We also have my gaming headset that I did in 2007, I still use it. We have our access controller, which is a one-handed controller for the PlayStation 2 and 3. And of course, the original Atari which I made over 10 years ago. It still works, although I think the batteries are dead - 9volt goes there. What else - oh yes, my very first camcorder. I still have it - this thing is pretty cool, it had a color screen back in 1992, very advanced - I don’t know if it still works but I still have it. And of course, how can you throw away Dan Aykroyd’s skull vodka bottle? This belongs in a museum.”

“Ben: Oh, this looks dangerous. This is where the magic happens, this is an extra second bedroom - but I have my portable work-bench again, and that is where I have my awesome computer desk which I designed myself in CNC. And, I made this awesome stand for my phone. Now, how much would you pay? There has been a lot of talk about the portable work-bench that snuck its way into episode 2, 4, and 6. All even numbered episodes, like good Star Trek movies. So, I figured I would show it to you guys in more detail, and girls for all the women watching. I am sure this is a top-rated program among the female demographic. These portions are made of the PVC, which is a material I like to use in some of my laptops too. I am not going to try and make any fancy illusions over where I got the idea for this - I got the idea from Ironman 2.

He pulls out his suit and puts it on, that was totally unrealistic, that would never have worked. First of all, John Favreau wouldn’t have picked it up with one hand - Gwyneth Paltrow wouldn’t have been able to pick it up with one hand. Just the motors to make it unfold alone wouldn’t fit. Basically you do it in sections, you have this part over here where you have some of your tools, drill bits, a little small multi-meter, some things - so you can fold this up here, and then you kind of do it in steps. You take this, it goes out, up, down - then if you look here there is a big bolt and this part here has a latch that goes onto it. The latch is activated by the handle here. So it actually has three stages - lock, lift, and open. So now that we have the halves together, we go to lift which combines this, then you fold this up, bring it up - hear all the bits and solder fall out - lift, in, close it, locked. See? And then when the wrestler is attacking you during a race, you can just unfold it very quickly, open - ta da. See there is a little metal thing here that goes back and forth - it is a locking cam and it matches up to the cam on this one. See how that matches? So that is closed and that is open until it slides through.”

“Ben: This is the X-Box 360 laptop that we built through episodes 1 thru 6. Let’s take another look at it, shall we? Now this is the actual X-Box 360 laptop that will be awarded to one lucky winner at the end of our contest. So basically, there is a power plug - it goes into the back, the power supply is all internalized. Both of them, for the X-Box and the screen. You just open it up and you are ready to rock and roll. Did you know that War never changes? Ron Pearlman would not lie, he was Hellboy for crying out loud. And he was in Enemy at the Gates. A fine movie with Rachel Wise and Jude Law - who is truly the Orlando Bloom of his time. It doubles as a hand dryer if you’re going bowling. You know Leo Neilson was in a Bill Paxton movie, called Next of Kin. He played a redneck, which was funny. But, he played a better redneck than Keanu Reeves did in The Gift. That was pretty poor. The X-Box 360 will download update in under 3 days. It is 4-days ahead of the PS3 updates. Yes, I did just say that. Sony, come on.

While the X-Box updates itself, a process that is taking longer than I would have thought, but still faster than PlayStation. Let me show you this neat screen, we are using this in episode 8. It is pretty cool, you can actually put in a thumb drive with video on it - I am going to use the patented trash can holder for this. Here we go, look at this - see you can play videos right off the card with the, oh here we go - Alien Hunter test footage. The test footage we did, what 2 years ago with Alien Hunter? It was going to be the greatest movie ever made - I guess it started over. Oh, the X-Box, yeah. Well there it is, we updated the X-Box that you can win with the new X-Box update.”

“Ben: My slogan at benheck.com is building for tomorrow, because today won’t last forever. This philosophy shines brightest at our new production facility located at the scenic east side of Madison, Wisconsin and it contains all of the most cutting-edge technology you could possibly imagine, as well as a mini-fridge. Join us now for an exclusive tour of the property.”

“Ben: Alright time for a tour of the new shop. This is the dungeon room, where all of the soldering goes on. As you can see, I have my old existing table. I just moved it in here and it fit. So we have all our parts over here, some shelves from Menard’s, a box, an extra X-Box - oh, there is something I need to take back with me. Here is some more stuff with some shelves, this wall is kind of boring right now - but I will put some stuff up to make it look better. Now, out here is the main administration portion of benheck.com. This is where all the big executive deals happen. This is a desk, I might get rid of it. As you can see, it has many pop cans and X-Box cables. However, that is not all - our benefits include a mini-fridge, and a microwave.

Plus, all the pretzels you can eat within reason. Now we enter the beating-heart of our operation. The main shop-room. Right now it is kind of empty, but it does have some cool features - such as, this over-complicated work-bench made out of kitchen cabinet material, a miniature version of a clock I have in my apartment; you may have seen it on some episodes. This one is smaller, we are going to put it on that wall, but I am missing a battery. This space over here, this is where the shop box is going to go -that square with the blue lines. We have a furnace, made by Trent Reznor’s furnace company. We have a sink, you can clean up your bloody limbs should you have some sort of mishap while making these mods. And then there is the infamous wall of circuits. Why have circuit boards sitting around in a box, you can turn them into Art. We have a variety of circuit boards here, from 64 to X-Box to Atari to Apple II - that is my favorite, even a module that appears to have fallen loose from Earthlink - there we go. And, when nature calls - there is also a bathroom, very important for modding.

I don’t know what else to say about the bathroom. Here is an oldy but goody - the MGD computer, some of you may remember this from my website years and years ago, it was a computer that I built in a MGD case and used it to record the audio. Over the years, I have removed quite a few of the parts - all of the wiring has been stripped out. There you have it, a tour of my new shop. It’s not really been pimped out yet, it still needs a lot of parts - we are still working on it, stay tuned.”

“Ben: A company approached me, wanting to build a cool point-of-sale system for a coffee shop. Point-of-sale is another word for cash-register where they put in your order. Anyway, most of those things kind of look like over-glorified PC’s and they are kind of industrial and boring. These guys want me to make something that looked cool and sharp and modern, let’s see what happens.”

“Ben: Alright, so what we did was we came up with this design. You guys had your paper, pen sketch - remember? You had it a little thinner than this, but we had to make it thicker just to make sure the parts fit. Anyway, pretty close - actually, quite close to what you guys drew up. So these are all separate aluminum pieces that were routed. These are OAO thickness edges, and this is the basic frame. We made up a bunch of pieces and welded them together. So, let’s do a demonstration. Here is the outer skin - and your black end caps - that you just insisted on. These are cut acrylic, pretty shiny - these will go here.”

“Ben: So we’ve got the system actually running, instead of our fake demonstration. Verdie, why don’t you show me how this works.”

“Verdie: So basically, let’s assume somebody is at the wall and they just walked in and they want to order a Gingerbread Latte. So, I just - okay, you want a Gingerbread Latte, no problem - you want small, medium, or large. They say large, okay. And, any options for you? Oh, you want soy milk because you are a Vegan and you want caramel syrup, two shots - no problem, I will hit that and finish. Let’s say the person actually says, I want to make that a medium, so I can just go here - change this to a medium, click finish. And now I can click process order, but before that I will say would you like a muffin today? They will say sure, add the muffin - process order. It will scan the order, it will say would you like mints or gummies with that? We can gummies and mints, both - and we can check-out, and we are ready to rock and roll. It is as easy as that.”

“Ben: What kind of mother-board are we using?”

“Verdie: Mini ATX board, pretty simple. It is ready to use when the processor is green, also it is running about 1.6Ghz right now, 1 Gb of dvr2 ram.”

“Ben: Looks like a salsy harddrive.”

“Verdie: Yeah, believe it or not - window XP will be up here in about 10-15 seconds.”

“Ben: Faster than Lennox, which is hard to believe. There it is, we have got the unit together. Your own point-of-sale system.”

“I notice you have this wooden device here holding your laptop, what is this?”

“Ben: This is the I-table. The story behind is, a friend of mine and a friend of his put these two pieces of boards together and hooked a 4x4 in the middle, and it just looked like crap. We called it the I-table because it looked like an I, but it was really useful for my friend so I copied it and I made a super I-table. So, I can put my laptop on it, and basically you can slide this up to your couch and - well let me show you. So, if you have a couch or whatever. You can sit and then you can bring the I-table, fit it up under the couch and doo doo doo. You can also put food on it. I don’t have any food, but you could.”

“You can pretend that this is food.”

“Ben: Oh yeah, mmmm.”

“Ben: Despite the rumors you may have heard, it is not all hard work here in Wisconsin. We often take breaks from our beer, cheese, and paper towel making to go buy pinball machines, as you will soon see.”

“Ben: Here is Chris Kraft’s Honda Element, right?”

“Chris: Yes.”

“Ben: Jones, and Chris, and I are the fellowship of the Pinball of The Lord of the Rings and we are going to go get it. We appear to be in some lake side boat loving community. Oh, A frame. Oh, that’s a cool house. The pinball machine has been loaded into Chris’ car. What does Jones think of this?”

“Jones: Mighty veracious.”

“Ben: There is Jones, he thinks we are going to follow him back to his place to install his pinball, but Chris and I are secretly going to steal it - aren’t we?”

“Chris: Yes.”

“Chris: Or we could just take this handle off, what do you think?”

“Ben: Actually, take it off - we will put the pinball on - the pinball has enough weight, we can push it.”

“Chris: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

“Ben: Alright, you ready?”

“Chris: Yep.”

“Ben: Well our work is done, catch you later.”

“Chris: Ben, wouldn’t it have been easier to have the Eagles just pick it up and carry it for you?”

“Ben: This is Ben Heck’s pinball installation service. We will bring pinball’s right to your door 24/7, 365 days a year except all major holidays. It comes with a book so you know what to do when you got your pinball. I have been installing pinball’s like this for 100 years, I know what I’m doing. Now you will too - call now. And craters went below the earth, Atlas - the God of pinball had been sentenced to hold up a pinball that was short one leg for all eternity.”

“Chris: Sweet, there is the two towers.”

“Ben: Alright, your machine is all installed. That will be $7,000.”

“Chris: $7,000? That is more than the thing cost.”

“Ben: I’m outta here, forget about it.”

“Ben: That is all the time we have for today - join us in the next episode as we build a rugged IPS-3 unit for a husband and wife serving in Afghanistan. And, also announce the winner of the X-Box 360 laptop. We will see you next time.”

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by element 14, the electronic community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. Use voucher code “BENHECK” until December 31^st at store check-out to save up to 15% on select items. We will see you next time.

Tags: mods, build_challenge, challenge, ben_heck, ben