Documents

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

cstanton — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:50:09 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by cstanton on 10/15/2024 11:50:09 AM

community.element14.com/.../Ben-Heck_2700_s-LiveStream-_5F00_-Help-Ben-Heck-Fix-a-Rare-Nintendo-Playstation-Prototype_2D00_-Part-II_2100_.mp4

In an earlier live stream event, Ben Heck made progress fixing a rare Nintendo PlayStation prototype before time ran out. Before returning the prototype to Terry and Dan Diebold the team will once again attempt to fix the hybrid console with help from community members! Tune in live and submit your feedback here to be a part of history as Ben and his team attempt to fix the only known Nintendo PlayStation hybrid!

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

cstanton — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 16:03:08 GMT

Revision 6 posted to Documents by cstanton on 7/6/2023 4:03:08 PM

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

cstanton — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:59:20 GMT

Revision 5 posted to Documents by cstanton on 7/6/2023 3:59:20 PM

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

cstanton — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:57:21 GMT

Revision 4 posted to Documents by cstanton on 7/6/2023 3:57:21 PM

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Ben Heck AMA - Live Stream Interview! Watch the Recording! - Closed: Win the Mini Pinball Machine!

cstanton — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 12:31:17 GMT

Revision 2 posted to Documents by cstanton on 10/13/2022 12:31:17 PM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

The Interview with Ben and the team was LIVE on:

June the 29th, 2018 at 9am US CST / 3pm UK BST

Thank you for joining us for the live stream! The recording is now available below

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

You commented with your questions for Ben Heck, Felix and Karen below, before and during the stream.

Make sure you register, log in and click 'Add Comment' !

Thank you for joining in with your questions to win THE Miniature Pinball Machine as built by the team on The Ben Heck Show!

Congratulations to glcoolhandf for winning the Miniature Pinball Machine!

(Terms and Conditions are attached to this document)

Attachments:

community.element14.com/.../Mini-Pinball-Contest-and-Giveaway-180622.docx

Mini Pinball Contest and Giveaway 180622.docx

Tags: ben heck ama, ask the team, ben heck ama livestream, mini pinball, tbhs_livestream, livestream, past_contest, the ben heck show, mini pinball giveaway

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

dorotheadmin — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 23:44:10 GMT

Revision 3 posted to Documents by dorotheadmin on 1/25/2022 11:44:10 PM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

cstanton — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 12:09:23 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by cstanton on 12/17/2021 12:09:23 PM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream was on March 12, 2017: 12 PM- 5PM US CDT - Thanks for Watching!

Join in with Part 2! Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

www.youtube.com/watch You must be logged into the element14 Community to view The Nintendo Playstation Livestream!

In this special live stream event The Ben Heck Team asks community members for help fixing a rare Nintendo PlayStation prototype. In a previous episode of 'The Ben Heck Show' Terry and Dan Diebold presented the team with the prototype, thought to be the only one left in existence, so they could do a teardown and fix it. Now the team is asking for help from the community as they attempt to make history!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the recorded Live Stream and Leave Your Feedback below!

Tags: nintendo hybrid console, playstation, nintendo entertainment system, super nintendo, nintendo, livestream, ben heck live stream, snes, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, sony, super famicom, sony playstation, nintendo sony playstation console

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

cstanton — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 11:08:09 GMT

Revision 4 posted to Documents by cstanton on 12/16/2021 11:08:09 AM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream was on March 12, 2017: 12 PM- 5PM US CDT - Thanks for Watching!

Join in with Part 2! Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

www.youtube.com/watch

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the recorded Live Stream and Leave Your Feedback below!

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

cstanton — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 11:04:37 GMT

Revision 3 posted to Documents by cstanton on 12/16/2021 11:04:37 AM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream was on March 12, 2017: 12 PM- 5PM US CDT - Thanks for Watching!

Join in with Part 2! Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

www.youtube.com/watch You must be logged into the element14 Community to view The Nintendo Playstation Livestream!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the recorded Live Stream and Leave Your Feedback below!

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

cstanton — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 20:21:31 GMT

Revision 2 posted to Documents by cstanton on 11/21/2021 8:21:31 PM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream Recorded on April 5, 2017: 3 PM- 6PM US CDT!

players.brightcove.net/.../index.html

Watch the Progress Made In the Previous Live Stream:

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the Recorded Live Stream as The Ben Heck Team Make History by Fixing a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

Witness their progress! Comments were fed directly to the team!

Tags: playstation, prototype, nintendo, livestream, the ben heck show livestream, the ben heck show, nintendo playstation prototype, nintendo playstation

Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype!

cstanton — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 20:20:16 GMT

Revision 2 posted to Documents by cstanton on 11/21/2021 8:20:16 PM

element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

Back to The Ben Heck Show homepage

Connect with TBHS

Featured Bonus Content

See All Episodes

Live Stream was on March 12, 2017: 12 PM- 5PM US CDT - Thanks for Watching!

Join in with Part 2! Live Stream: Help Ben Heck Fix a Rare Nintendo Playstation Prototype - Part II!

www.youtube.com/watch

Watch Ben's Previous Attempts to Fix the Nintendo PlayStation Protoype:

Episode 246: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 1 Episode

Episode 247: Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode

Episode 265: Ben Heck's Nintendo PlayStation Update at Portland Retro Gaming Expo

Terry and Dan Diebold:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/06/nintendo-playstation-is-real-and-it-works/

Watch the recorded Live Stream and Leave Your Feedback below!

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 10: Ben Build a Hand Crank Phone Charger

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:55:39 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:55:39 PM

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by element 14. Visit element14.com/tbhs to learn how a purchase of $100 or more can get you a free subscription to Make Magazine, while supplies last.

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 have an idea you’d like to see built - why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

"Ben: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show. On this episode we are going to be tackling several different projects. Every notice that android phones eat batteries like it’s going out of style, and there never seems to be a charger around when you need one. Well, I sure have - so the first thing we are going to do is work on some kinetics, motion, and wind up chargers for those phones. Then it’s back to pinball wars, while my friends and I work on the new game cabinet. Finally, we will be taking an LCD screen that I have that doesn’t work quite right and rebuilding it into something useful. Let’s get started shall we."

"Ben: Okay, for the charger here is my plan. You can get those little wind up chargers at Harbor Freight where you basically have a handle and you go reer, reer. Then there is an LED flashlight. So these things probably have some sort of simple power generator inside of them and some circuitry to power the DC diodes of the LED’s. My thought is maybe we could make it to the back and forward motions of your legs while you are walking around. It would actually charge up your cell phone which would also be in your pocket. What we will need then is a wind up flashlight, android phone to test on, and then one of those micro USB adapters so the juice can go into it. Pretty simple."

"Ben: Here is a cheapy flashlight wind up from Harbor Freight. Yahoo. The inside, I think the important thing to look at when you are generating power is you have a lot of gearing. So, you have your crank - when you turn this, this gear turns then it multiplies into this gear, it bumps into this gear, and it bumps into this gear and then it goes into the motor. You have quite a bit of gearing in there, one revolution here is quite a few here. Regardless, if we are going to use a motor like this - we are going to have a lot of gearing. We need to copy this out and see what kind of voltage we can get out this. Here, the circuitry is pretty similar. Instead of four diodes, it’s got a rectifier. You put alternating current in here and then DC comes out that side. Whichever way you turn the crank, you get DC."

"Ben: Let’s see what we can get out of this little generator. We have removed the batteries, and hooked up the multi-meter directly to the rectifiers. We are just going to be seeing what voltage we will be getting out of this. Hey, you want some butter? It is not too hard to get 5 volts out of this. This might be a better candidate than the first one we tried. Come on, oh yeah - we can totally jump start a car now. In the last example we saw that it was very easy to get 5-volts, and we could even get up to 13. Of course, that is too much for a USB charged device, which are all 5-volts.

What we have done here is we have attached a Zener diode to the negative pole - the rectifier and then we have a 10 ohm resistor to the positive pole. We are using this to make very simple voltage regulation circuits. This pole here will be ground and this will be positive voltage out. Let’s see what we can get. It is pretty easy to get 5-volts, when I crank faster we can’t get much past 5-volts. So, our little voltage regulator circuit, which is very simple, keeps us safe."

"Ben: Well then, let’s proceed immediately to attempt charging the USB device. Oh look, it’s my H2C-EVO phone, which is really awesome and it also gets not so great battery life. Before we hook it up to this charger we put together, we are going to try the known state. I’ve got this micro-USB plug I got from my car charger I am going to hook up to my power supply and ensure that the pin-out is correct while charging the phone. Power supply is running, it is hooked up to the USB plug, and the phone is charging. We know that it works, so let’s move on. Alright, so I have the phone hooked up to the charger, and I am also monitoring the voltage using this multi-meter. Let’s see what happens. Okay, you can see the lighting bolt kicked on - so the phone is charging."

"Ben: Now that we know the circuit works, we can shrink it down to fit it inside the case. Going over it once again - the DC motor can go in either direction, so it goes through a rectifier which takes the alternating current and makes it direct current. That way, positive and negative will always be the same. This goes through a Zener diode, then a 10 ohm resistor, which makes it a simple voltage regulator. The regulated 5-volt output is then sent to a USB port where you can plug in any device you want."

"Ben: So there is the first part of our concept. We have taken this cheapy Harbor Freight wind up flashlight, attached a USB port on top of it so you can take your standard charge cable or really anything, I guess, plug it in, plug it into your device, and then if you are ever lost on a desert island - you can wind up your phone and charge it so you can call for help and get rescued."

"Ben: We showed how we can use a cheap Harbor Freight wind up flashlight to charge your cell phone. Who wants to sit around doing this, when you’ve got the built-in locomotion of your legs when you are walking around conventions - come on. It’s right there, let’s use it or see if it will work. Let’s see, there has got to be a way to do this. I’ve got my multi-meter, my charger, my very high-tech USB plug. I suppose if I took a piece of wood, taped it to my leg and taped it to this thing, I could simulate what I am trying to do. Yes, this makes sense. Remember, prototypes are prototypes - not done-o-types. It doesn’t matter how bad they look, well sometimes it does. I guess that makes sense. Now, some people see my work and they are like wow, Ben - everything you do is so polished and neat and clean. I am like, yes, that is the stuff you normally see - everything else looks like this. It’s just - whatever works. It doesn’t sound like it is moving very much - very minimal. Let’s try this out here, see what kind of flow we are getting. The voltage is not that great. Going back and forth like this really doesn’t give us enough charge, we really need it to do something like this. Unless of course, we made into some sort of exercise device."

"Ben: Green Technology - rechargeable batteries. With the explosive growth of portable devices in the world today, there is more need than ever for a cheap, efficient way to power them. However, the standard, old, throw away batteries of the past - they work but it’s not very good for the environment. In fact, where have all those batteries gone? Landfills, piles and piles of them - every time you run the batteries dry in your Gameboy - those batteries just end up in a ditch someplace. That is not really the way to go. Element 14 carries a wide variety of batteries in all shapes and sizes for all of your portable project powering needs. Give rechargeable batteries a try. You will actually save money in the long run so you will be saving Green and keeping the earth Green too. It’s a win/win - go for it."

"Ben: We now return to Pinball Wars. For those of you just joining us - team Heckendorn is locked in a life or death struggle with Jeri Ellsworth to build the coolest, custom-made pinball machine of all time. Today, we will be building more cabinets and working on the test-play field to help us quickly design our shots. In the last episode of our show, we started building the physical cabinets themselves for the team Heckendorn machines. We also showed how a micro-controller could be used for the brains of the machine, both to take input and to create sound effects."

"Mike: Now Ben, I know that I am part of your team, but I have no idea what this is."

"Ben: Oh yes, this is the rapid pinball prototyping system - or RPPS for short. What happens is you’ve got a blank plate here that has no holes in it, right. Then we have this polycarbonate thing that goes down over it - what we do is we make little modular pieces of the board, like curves and tracks and bolt through this onto the piece. That way, you can lie it down onto the board and you can move it around and change it without drilling your board full of holes. You can rapidly try new shots with the flipper and the plunger."

"Mike: Yes, that is a good idea."

"Ben: I think it will work out good. It will certainly be the best way to go for a pinball machine. No other person in the world could think of this, besides team Heckendorn."

"Ben: A senior member of team Heckendorn, Mike built a work table for the shop."

"Mike: Great."

"Ben: This is Joe, I am training him at using the CNC so our armies can take over the earth. Start the reactor. Mike has done the very important work of hooking up the radio. Watch and weep. Ha Ha Ha - we cannot be stopped. Okay, that won’t quite work. Yes, Yes, Yes!"

"Ben: I have this dead LCD screen, I might have caused the back lighting not to work while using it for a project. As you can see, it’s pretty big. It probably a 23 or 24 inch. What I think I will do is take it apart, and find a new way to back-light it. The LCD itself actually still works. We very carefully lift out the glass of the frame. You basically don’t want to touch anything you don’t have to. The back-surface you want to keep nice and clean. There is a black plastic frame here that the LCD sits into. We are going to want to retain that, but we have to remove it in order to remove the back, which is metal. Like I said - don’t touch anything you don’t have to.

This thing will remember your fingerprints better than a PSP and an iPhone put together. I think we can use the black frame here to our advantage. We will set the screen into it again, like it originally was. We are going to kind of re-assemble it backwards. Where did that red hair come from? Here is the main piece that distributes the light. It looks like it has been clamped in place. Lovely. I will pry this open with a screwdriver. Come on, there we go. Then, we snap it all back into place, and as you can see it has re-become a solid module. We can draw this into the computer and make a new frame for it."

"Ben: Then we draw it into the computer, we have one shape here that represents the total size of the assembly. Then we measure how far in the screen actually is, or where the pixels are from the edges and then we use that to make these boxes here. Then we can use that to draw the inside opening, which is that square I just drew. Eleven minutes later, it is done. Now the pieces to make our new LCD frame. Alright, well we have got the frame cut out. As you see, it stacks together. We have got an inner lip portion, which holds the screen in place. Then there is an outer area, which holds the majority of it. As you can see, it goes in like this - it fits in there. We are going to attach a little bit of a frame in the back for the electronics so they don’t flop around and destroy themselves.

I should probably consult my own design files, that way I can be sure I am putting this together right. That looks pretty good. That holds this top frame, where your electronics are going to go. We did it like this so we can bolt this out of the way - so we can back-light this. Alright, now to put in the back piece. I can’t believe I did this. All this high-tech machinery and I am going to have to use a saw. There we go. Remember the rule of knife, always cut away from yourself - not toward yourself, for obvious reasons. The wood screws are slightly thicker than the LCD frame, so the chances of us squeezing and crushing the glass is fairly low. Now I am going to mount the electronics here, not much rhyme or reason - just trying to keep it out of the way of the light. If you wanted to make your own projector out of an old LCD, this is pretty much exactly how they do it.

They basically strip down the LCD, but they remove all the diffusing because they want the bareness to come through. You move the electronics out of the way, and then shine a big, bright light on it and you put it through a lens so it projects. What is it called - lumen-labs? Alright, we are ready to test out this amazing contraption. I know what you might be thinking, because I was thinking it too. We are using a treble-lamp here to provide the illumination. Ah yes, there is already a lot more light coming through. We can actually see what is on the screen now. See how it is kind of yellowish? That is because it is an incandescent light. If you try one of those curly Q - CFL’s or compact fluorescent lamp - we might have better luck.

Ah ha, not only have I saved thousands upon thousands of pounds of plastic, but this is going to save tons of energy. After I used the giant CNC machine to route out wood that I could have cut by hand. Okay, well I can play around with it and make it brighter, but as you can see - what was once a useless un-back-lit LCD has now been given new life. It may not look as pretty as it used to, but at least it’s not dead."

"Ben: That is all the time we have for today. In our next episode, we will be working on a portable game system I have been wanting to build for years. The Sega-CDX. We will see you then."

The Ben Heck Show was made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today, visit element14.com. We will see you next time.

Tags: portable, Block Diagrams, mods, build, build_challenge, challenge, ben_heck, hand_crank, charger, show_idea

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 9: See Ben Building A Pinball Machine

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:55:39 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:55:39 PM

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by element 14. Visit element14.com/tbhs to learn how a purchase of $100 or more can get you a free subscription to Make Magazine, while supplies last.

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: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show. In today’s episode we are going to be building a pinball machine. We will start by installing a new CNC machine in my shop. We can use this to cut out the parts. Then we will work on the design, which will include useful tips for your own Cad-Cam project. By the way Cad-Cam stands for ‘Computer Aided Design-Computer Aided Manufacturing’. Finally, we will discuss how to use an embedded processor to control everything. If you have been interested in embedded processors in the past, this will be a great introduction to their use. Enough talk, let’s get started.”

“Ben: Here is the Shop-Bot CNC machine I ordered. It comes in a crate, some assembly required. This should be easy - most of the parts are either structural or electronic in nature. As we discussed in episode 2, a CNC machine is really simple. It is the software to run it that is complicated. Some assemblies come prebuilt, such as this Y-Axis arm. Most of the construction time involves putting the table together and keeping it square. The Y-Axis arm is a fixed size with rollers on the end, so we have got to make sure that the sides on our table are parallel so it will all fit together. Three layers of material are used to create the worktable. Now, we have to get everything up and running. One of the biggest dangers with CNC is the machine damaging its self or the routing bits. So we take everything slowly, first doing air-cuts before actually cutting material.”

“Dan: Do you want to do one on all four corners? Are there three more holes on there?”

“Ben: Yeah.”

“Dan: Just to see if it fits the table. Make the same in four inches from each corner.”

“Ben: Oh, got it, got it. I’m going to actually cut some material.”

“Ben: Our next step is to cut holes in all four corners of the table to make sure the machine can operate at its full 4 x 8 foot size. The top layer of MDF board is the sacrificial material, the work surface that will get banged up along the way. We have the machine drill counter-sink holes into this. That way, when we put the screws in to secure that table the heads of the screws will be deep below the surface, so we won’t hit them with the bit later on by accident; we do another pass to put small guide-holes aside the bigger ones. Then it is time to screw everything down. There is a casualty along the way though, the fan blades on my favorite drill just blow up out of nowhere.”

“Ben: Next crappy drill bit please.”

“Ben: The table is now securely fastened. Even if the bit digs into it a little it won’t hit the screws because they have been countersunk. We then test out the 3D functions of the machine by carving out a small replica of a Porsche. Not wanting to bore my friends to death, I do the next part later on by myself – surfacing the table. Wood is rarely completely flat so the machine skims off a thin layer to make it flat. This process takes forever, so I work on a customer’s single-handed controller in the meantime.”

“Ben: Now that the CNC machine is up and working – we can work on the cabinet designs themselves. We have our basic pinball design - however, this one is not at the right rotation. The machines are actually tilted forward a little bit - at about exactly negative 3.5 degrees, which makes the legs level down there at the bottom. The new thing we are going to try is having folding legs. Now, it might not be entirely obviously by this drawing but here is one of the new pinball legs. Inside the unit is going to be some square tubing, the leg will slide out of the tubing like this and then it will rotate on a hinge or a pin, which will be right there. Then finally, it will fold up under the unit. So the bottom leg goes vwoomp, voom; the back one goes vwoomp, thugump.

Now you might be thinking all the legs are going to hit each other, right? Wrong. If you look at the back of the unit, we have another line drawing here. You can see the back leg is going to drop down and slide over. Your back leg will do this – it will come down, it will come in a little bit, and it will go up and then the front one will just come up and they will sit side by side. So what we are doing here is we are making the machine fit within a small area. If we select all this stuff, we will see that it will fit under - 27 inches of height. I think it will work out pretty good, so the next thing to do is to actually route out this sucker.”

“Ben: The CNC machine is controlled by a laptop via USB. Currently this laptop is sitting on a table, which is fairly inconvenient. I have to go over to it, sit down, type stuff, select OK, blah, blah, blah. However, this laptop must be attached to the machine at all times, it sends commands and codes line by line. My solution was to design and cutout a rolling computer desk, which can hold the laptop, mouse pad, and power supply. I can type on it standing up and roll it closer to the machine when doing calibrations. It may look like something out of Sky-Ball, but it fits my needs perfectly.”

“Ben: Alright, it is all put together. I have a rolling table which will move the computer around to control the CNC machine. Now, on to pinball.”

“Ben: We are almost ready to route. We use a program called PartWorks, which is also sometimes called ReCard to generate the file to control the machine. We are going to use two bit tools, an inch bit – to drill the holes for the screws and some of the connection points, then a ¼ inch bit – to do the main cut outs around the edges. Let’s preview all tool paths to see what it is going to do when I route out this pinball machine. There are the screw holes, there are the notches to slide boards into, there are the inch holes which are air vents, and a coin door. Here is where the glass goes and then there are the shapes themselves, Bam! Done! Three points, swish.”

“Ben: It takes about an hour to cut out all the parts, but they do fit on a single 4 x 8 piece of MDO plywood. MDO is Medium Density Overlay, and has a solid paper coating on each side, instead of wood grain. A friend of mine suggested using it since we will be covering everything with graphics anyway. We talked about sliding legs earlier. Now we are routing the brackets for them. The end caps have grooves which help us align the pieces for easy assembly and also add strength. These brackets hold the square aluminum tubing where the legs will slide in and out of. We drill two holes in each aluminum tube and then secure it to the wooden bracket with machine screws. Now we will show an example of how the legs go in the cabinet.”

“Ben: Alright, so here is the tubing where the legs will fit in. This is a mis-engineering divot right there. So the legs slide up into the tubing like this, you can see there is a slot on the leg, so what happens is – this comes out like this, in theory. Then it rotates so it can fold up under the cabinet like that. It would seem that in true Ben fashion, I have made my tolerances too tight. To compensate for that, I have a tolerance compensation tool. Another engineering job well done. There you have it, we have designed, routed, and assembled a pinball machine cabinet. In future episodes we will come back and take a look at this build to see how it is progressing.”

“Ben: As I mentioned earlier, we won’t be able to finish the entire pinball machine in this episode – but we will get started on the programming which makes it tick, using an embedded processor. Our sponsor’s element 14 now carry a very popular type of embedded processor called the Arduino board. At the element 14 store, you can choose from Arduino Nano, Uno and Mega boards. This for instance is a Mega board. The difference between them is the amount of features and memory they have.

They are great for doing embedded projects where you want to sense or control the environments, such as robotics, RFID readers or perhaps, even a pinball machine. Plus, the development environment is a completely open source, so you can do it on Windows, Mac or Lennox. Check out all the Arduino boards at element14.com and check out element14.com/tbhs for details on how you can get a free subscription to Make Magazine while supplies last. This offer is only good in the United States, but you can check the site for other promotions in your region.”

“Ben: Now let’s talk about using embedded processors for this and other applications. Something large, like a pinball machine, could be controlled with a PC – but if you are making a smaller device a large, power-hungry PC isn’t the best option or even an option at all. That is when you turn to embedded processors. You get the logic of a computer, yet the small size of an integrated circuit. One popular platform is the Arduino. It is an open source development environment around Atnos line of 18 mega-processors. Once you buy an Arduino board, you can download the software and tutorials to run it at www.arduino.cc.

I am also a fan of the parallax propeller processor, which I used on my Bill Paxton pinball machine. It has eight internal processors, which allow you to do very easy multi-tasking – though the RAM is kind of limited. It can also output video, which can be useful for debugging. You can download their software at www.parallax.com. Let’s look at three examples of what you can do with these processors – input, output, and sound. Remember, these basics can be applied through all sorts of projects – I just wanted to get your creative juices flowing.”

“Ben: For my input example I will be using something we are all familiar with – a Nintendo 8-bit controller. Every notice how it has 8 buttons, but only 7 pins on the plug? How can that work? The answer is a ‘shift-register’. The controller contains a shift-register, which is an integrated circuit that converts parallel inputs, such as buttons, to serial data. The CPU sends a pulse on the latch line, this gets the button data into the register and ready to go. The CPU then pulses a clock line 8 times, each pulse retrieving a bit from the register. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam – the byte has now been transferred. Let’s take a look at this in practice with the NES controller. Here is a little demonstration – we have a Nintendo controller, and it’s shifting its bits into this. It is quite simple – you have up, down, left, right, select, start, B, A. So, yeah – the controller basically fits into one byte of data. That is how the Nintendo reads it and that’s how you can read a shift-register.

Now, it might not seem that useful to only read 8 bits or one byte from a shift-register, but what you can do is put them in series – like in this drawing. Basically what happens is as you shift out the bits from one shifter, it shifts them into the next shift-register. Kind of like a centipede. You could have four shift-registers in a row, and that would actually get you 32 bits – you can actually daisy chain as many together as you want, within reason. It just depends on the speed of accessing it with your program. So, if you have 10,000 shift-registers obviously it would take a longer time to shift out that data than one shift-register. But, with a high-speed processor you can daisy chain quite a few together and still get the data out pretty quickly therefore, giving yourself many more inputs than you have on your processor itself, or outputs – as well. You can use a shift register for an output in the same way, just reversed. The CPU has a number ready and send 8 clock pulses to put this data onto the shift-register. When the CPU pulses the latch line, the data appears on the output and can light LED, trigger relays, or whatever you want.”

“Ben: Here is a parallax propeller. I put this little board together myself, basically you have got the CPU, a crystal to drive the clock, and an e-prop to load the program and a little 3.3 power regulator. So what happens is you can hook up some power, I think that is like 12-volts. Then, it goes into the circuit and that is all there is to it. You also have this thing over here, which are SD cards. With all these embedded processors, you can go out on the internet and find library – such as a library which allows you to access the data on an SD card. This stuff is usually already figured out, so once you find the library you are good to go. Then we also have a little audio plug here, it looks like a mess because it is.

Then finally, you have this USB to serial adapter. Typically you need these embedded processors to be programmed for the USB. Usually the plug will be on the board itself, in the case of this one there is not much circuitry here so I had to buy this external adapter. There we go, right there it is ready to program. So now let’s move on to the program.”

“Ben: Let’s start by putting the audio clip on the SD card. I have my sound-forge program here, which I think is the oldest program I still use. I don’t know why I still use it, but I do. Heavy traffic, why not – look it still works. Then we need to make sure it is the right format to work on the SD card with the propeller. We are going to call this traffic and we want to make sure it 44/100hz, which is 44/100 samples per second, 16-bit stereo – okay, also known as CD quality. Okay, so the SD card with the data – you hook it up into the little processor, the processor is hooked up to my stereo so when that sound comes through we can hear it. Now we need to do the program, this is the propeller tool. It is the development environment for the propeller processor.

You can download it off their site, or if you are using the Arduino, they have their own development right here. Again, it is the same thing. You write out your code, and there are plenty of samples on the internet to get you started. You write out your code and then you upload it to your integrated circuit, and then it executes. So, let’s go back to the propeller here. I found an object which plays music off an SD card. All the work is pretty much done for us here, we just have to check a few things. The pins that it outputs on, that we hooked up the headphone jack to. We have to make sure that is correct, we actually used pin 16/17 – right. We go back up here, the first thing it does is – mount 0, which means we are going to mount the SD card and attach to pin 0 thru 3. Then there is a team here, called play. All we need to do is we need to call that – so we go play and our parameters, which is the string which has the file name – which was traffic.wav. Switch on the propeller, and hit compile. It sends it. It is kind of an over modulated sound clip, but as you can hear – it is playing off the chip.”

“Ben: That is all the time we have for today. Join us in the next episode as we build solar powered and kinetic powered chargers for some portable devices, such as the power-hungry android. We will see you then.”

The Ben Heck Show is made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today, visit element14.com. We will see you next time.

Tags: pinball_machine, Block Diagrams, mods, build, build_challenge, pinball, idea, ben_heck

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show – Episode 8: See Ben Build A Military Grade Portable PS3

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:55:31 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:55:31 PM

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 creating new projects. If you’ve got an idea you’d like t see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

“Ben: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show. We are changing things up a bit with our full season. Now, on each episode we will focus on a single project or viewer suggestion. This will give us more time per episode to go into more detail of the project. We will still be making our Big Builds, but now those will have their own dedicated episodes every few months instead of being spread out over several months. Don’t worry, we will keep you posted on what we are working on. Let’s take a look at today’s Viewer Challenge. It comes from Erica Kokkeby who writes: Hi Ben, I’ve followed your game console mods for a while.

My husband and I are currently deployed in Afghanistan and have been working on several different models of “ruggedized” game systems. I’d like to enlist you help in designing and building a mini version of our cases, specifically using a Storm iM2600 case. I know you do amazing work and I’d really like your expertise in moving forward. Thanks in advance for your help. Erica Kokkeby. So what Erica is suggesting is that instead of making a game system inside a custom case that we build ourselves, we build a game system inside an existing pelican case, like this one. Let’s call them up via Skype and talk with them about what exactly they need.”

“Ben: Alright, well we’ve got them on the video phone using Skype from Afghanistan. Say hello to our special guests. Could you introduce yourselves?”

“Erica: I am Erica Kokkeby.”

“Kris: And I am Kris Kokkeby. I travel a lot working with the military and I’m always playing video games with my buddies. And, when we’re out here things can get slow, so we play video games to pass the time. I always thought it’d be nice to have something more portable to carry my system in.”

“Ben: So you have a monitor picked out that you know will fit in this case you sent me?” “Kris: It’s taken us a while to build it and they keep discontinuing monitors on us.” “Ben: I was doing some calculations yesterday, and by calculations I mean I was drawing lines on the screen and it seemed to me that 20 inch was about the limit for this case, but you are saying that if we think about a 22, it would fit. Are you guys using an external audio amplifier?”

“Kris: No, we were just using the speakers that came with the monitor.” “Ben: Alright, so what else do you want in this thing? Do you want a network switch?” “Kris: So the network switch we thought, basically we want to be able – when we are out with a couple guys and they all have one, I don’t have to bring a hub to plug everybody into. I can just plug them into the case.” “Ben: element14 is actually going to spring for this for you, so it will be a gift from them, and thanks for your service over there.” “Kris: Oh awesome, thank you.”

“Erica: Thank you very much.” “Ben: Well, why don’t we talk more via email and get me a better detailed list of better what you want and we will get this thing together for you as soon as we can.” “Kris: Okay, sounds great.”

“Ben: This is the screen we want to put in the pelican case. It’s a Samsung – it has built in speakers, which is handy. But, I definitely think we are going to have to improve the casing a bit for it to have a chance to fit. Remember on most modern monitors, there might be one or two screws to start and the rest of it just basically snaps apart. It is always important to mark things when you take it apart, so you can put it back in the same ways. This is the power for the bulbs - we will mark the inside ones with some green so we hook it up right when we put it back together. Almost any LCD you take apart – at least an older one that doesn’t have LED is going to be the same way, driver board – power board.

How do LCD monitor prices keep plummeting you might ask, well look at this. Four hole screws, that is the only thing keeping this together plus the board with the buttons for the front controls. It is not even screwed in place, it is sonically welded. We are going to have to actually snap it out of there. See that – again cheaper than screws. Something to watch out for – this rubbery material here is actually transferring heat from this heat sync into the RF shielding. We have to make sure that this package is cooled sufficiently in the new unit. This is kind of the moment of truth, we need to find out if all this stuff fits in here. This one might be dubious – let’s see, we will put that there. We’ve got our driver board, and of course the LCD. Well, the LCD and everything fits, some of the portions on this board might be a bit tall but I think we can make it work. The next thing to do is to draw this thing into the computer.”

“Ben: The most important thing to do with a design is to replicate the case accurately on the screen. The most important thing about the case is the perimeter of the inside of it. I can take a base measurement from the edges – here, here, here and here. You get 20 by 14 inches. However, the base gets narrower in the corners here. The case does this, it curves in a little bit, curves out, curves in, and curves out again. So if we tried to do a straight 20 by 14 piece, it wouldn’t fit. The ends would overlap, so we have to very carefully draw a curved case for it to work. I have already drawn on the screen, however I did not put a good case on it. So this represents the screen inside the case, as you can see we have right at the edges so it should work.

We still have about ¼ inch gap here, and here. Down here at the bottom, we have the coax sticking out so you can still use as a TV tuner if you want. The two speaker and the touch controls, which are these things right here. But, there will be a big hole and then there will be a piece of acrylic and then the touch buttons will be behind it as well as the IR sensor. Then it is important not to forget this, this is a big notch at the bottom of the unit so the cords can make it to the base of the unit. Specifically you have HDMI and power for the screen.”

“Ben: With the top half design because it is fairly simple, we can work on the bottom half of the unit. Now, according to the client – this is what they wanted. We need a big power supply – power strip thing. We need a little switch so they can hook up multiple things to it, and this one would go to the PlayStation. This will be down here in the unit, and it also has its power supply, so we will put that down on the end. The PlayStation-3, obviously, and that can go right here. There is quite a bit of depth in here, you could almost fit a PlayStation and an X-Box in here, but don’t give anyone any ideas. So, that is the basic components – it is not terribly complicated, there should be enough room. So I guess the thing is – get everything mounted in here and make it look pretty.”

“Ben: Let’s take a break from this build to thank our sponsors – element14. The online community is great for electronic engineers, hobbyists, and students alike. If you like electronics, you should check it out. You can go in, log on, ask questions, find answers, it’s awesome. For more information on my projects, and a full list of the parts we used today, visit element14.com/tbhs. One thing that comes up a lot in electronics, and certainly in this build – is thermal management. Ever notice they are called semi-conductors, and not super-conductors. That is because they don’t conduct all the electricity efficiently and the waste becomes heat. So there are basically two parts to the thermal management solution, you’ve got your heat sync, which is typically made out of aluminum or sometimes copper, sometimes steel – every so often.

That is going to be on your package that it is getting too hot. Then typically your heat sync will have fins, the reason for that is it creates more surface area for the heat to escape. That heat is transferred into the air, and you have a fan which takes all that hot air and blows it out of the system. There are many online resources to help you out at element14.com.”

“Ben: Now it is time to go and get the CNC routing done for the project. My CNC machine hasn’t arrived yet. The CNC designs go from my laptop to the router computer and then out to the router itself. All the aluminum parts for this project are cut from .080 thickness stock. We bring the case along so we can test the fit immediately. After confirming it is good, we route the bottom frames that will hold the PlayStation-3 and other components. Some of the parts are then bent using a machine called an auto-brake. Finally, we paint them in our state-of-the-art production facility.”

“Ben: These are the basic parts to the bottom of the unit. There is a base frame, which was bent on the auto-brake and it bolts into the case using these four holes. On that goes the mount for the PlayStation-3, this mounts to the earlier plate using shock-mounts. Then finally, we have the main plate itself, which has grooves in the back so the doors and filters can slide in and out. As I mentioned innumerable times on the show, you have to build things you can take apart – which means, we have to put this together in a certain order. So we put down this base-plate, then we will install things like the network switch. Then we take apart the PlayStation and bolt it onto this, then we install this on that, then we bolt in the four corners to the case, uh.”

“Ben: I love taking apart the PS-3 Slim, because look you open it up – it looks like a car inside, it has plastic molding here with text on it – Sony Computer Entertainment. They expect you to open it – the PlayStation logo is like this medullized power supply. It is so cool. I think the PS-3 is well-built. There is no doubt about that. Okay, now it should pull out. I think my phone just went off. Anyway, here is AC power in the power supply – isn’t that cool, look at that. It looks like an ink cartridge or something. Anyway, the power supply outputs 12-volts into the PlayStation and this comes into the PlayStation to power it or to trigger it to come on. Then we have a Blue-Ray drive, and over here we have the micro-simulator and there it is.

So now we have to put it back together. Hey, check it out it’s tap, the tool that didn’t make it into episode 5 because I didn’t have it in my toolbox, we use this to tap some nice holes into this frame so the size 4 screws will fit great. Just a few months ago, the Blue-Ray player on the PS didn’t have near this many connections – this is really ridiculous looking. So if they changed that, then they changed the circuit board a little. But one thing that they very rarely change is the case, so if you draw the screw holes right once, all the hardware revisions continue to fit perfectly. The reason for that is because changing injection molds is very, very expensive – so they will change everything else first before they actually change the physical mold of the case. As you can see, all the screw holes that I drew in from the PS laptop – I had that file laying around so I just applied it here, saves time. The screws are all driven, now we can put the PlayStation onto it. It should line up pretty well. Here we have put the Wi-Fi modules at the bottom of the frame, we used double-sided tape to insulate this metal from this metal.

The next step is to attach the PlayStation-3 frame to the base-frame. We are using these little rubber things I found at the hardware store – I didn’t make the holes for them quite big enough, so I have to use the cheapy drill method. If you don’t have big enough bits, just wheel it around in there. This frame will go on this, then bolts go through the rubber things, which have threads in them by the way. And then, out here, so the whole thing just kind of rides on those rubber things. This is insulated from vibration through a layer of rubber, basically. We are doing this with something called a lock-nut, it is like a regular nut but there is nylon there. It is firmer and holds the bolt in place. You can put a lock-nut on anything you can see a thread. It is a lot easier to drive the bolt in the lock-nut, than to twist the lock-nut onto the bolt. You wouldn’t think so, but it is true. There is the frame all installed, so it can kind of move on its own a little bit. We have the mainframe here which connects to the case and the power supply, and back in the back we can see the network switch. The PlayStation-3 is in there now and you can kind of see the shock coming out. See how it kind of moves independently of the case, that is kind of the idea – is to help protect it a little bit.

We need to port out the power and eject button. The little ribbon cable with this hooks up to the motherboard, so all we really need it the circuit board. This header has far more pins than we need. We only need three, eject – power, and ground. By having more pins, it allows us to remove some of the pins to make a key so the header can only be inserted the right way. We have wired the header to the existing button, and there we go. Now we can bring the power and eject buttons out elsewhere, to the front of the case. We have this plastic here for the buttons, we put that in the slots. Then we put these tack switches over it so you can turn on the power.”

“Ben: With the buttons done, we need to work on the top half. We have the LCD here and we are going to use these frames – these things need to fit back here on the left and right sides of these ridges. The trick is to position them onto the LCD in a way to where they will miss the ridges. This one might be a little tricky. We clamp the spacers in place, and then drill through to them. Next up is the LCD itself. So we lay that down, then we put our frame over it. The screen frame really doesn’t hold very much, the speakers and this. Really it is the LCD that attaches to the back of the case, so we will attach the screen frame to the LCD and the LCD attaches to the case. Does that make sense? All right, the screen is installed. Now it is time for the moment of truth. Will it close? Keep your fingers crossed. I wasn’t worried for a minute. And now to take it apart, we undo the screws in the back and it should just reveal it. Ta Da! Now we can heat sync on the circuit.”

“Ben: With the unit working, it is time to put this plate on. It has a few features, it has some filters I taped in place – power switch – Ethernet port, and the USB. And of course, a sliding door. I hope I can get this to close. Brute force method – yeah!” “Ben: That’s all the time we have for today. In our next episode we will start building a pinball machine. We would also like to extend a big congratulations to Andrew, he is the winner of the X-Box 360 laptop. Zelp, as he is known, is pretty excited to win – and I quote: Holy crap, are you serious. Yes, we are serious. All my friends will be so jealous, this is awesome. Yes, it is quite awesome and they probably will be jealous. Congratulations again, Andrew. We will see you all next time.”

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by element14, the electronic community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. We will see you next time.

Tags: Design Resources, ben_heck

Viewer Challenge - Automatic Cable Wraper

Former Member — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:55:21 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by Former Member on 11/9/2021 4:55:21 PM

Hello Ben,

Since I saw your ad on facebook I have watched every show. I love it! How do you know so much?! I am a producer/sound engineer and I own a studio in Pasadena, California. It is not uncommon for me to have as many as thirty cables out at once, and it is irksome to have to wrap them up each night. I would be interested in finding out if there was a way to automate the process. To be honest I don’t think it is possible here is a clip explaining the process http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6duVvwdd5F0. Any help would be amazing.

Thank you so much, and I like I said I love the show,

Nels Jensen

Tags: Design Resources

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 1: Ben Mods an X-Box 360

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:55:01 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:55:01 PM

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by, element 14 – the electronic design community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. Join now and browse the store at element14.com.

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

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

Since then, he has continued his working 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: Hello and welcome to the all new Ben Heck Show, where we build cool projects based off community suggestions. I am your host, Benjamin J. Heckendorn. You might remember me from such projects as Bill Paxton Pinball or the X-Box 360 laptop. In each episode of the show we are going to take a viewer request and then build it. This will be known as the Viewer Challenge.

We will also be doing larger projects along the way that can’t be finished in the course of a single episode. These will be called the Big Builds, and we will cover those as we go along. The first Big Build we are going to tackle is an X-Box 360 laptop. Stay tuned later for details on how you can enter for a chance to win it, once it’s completed.”

“Ben: Our first Viewer Challenge comes from Dan Bertholomey who writes: Hello Sir, my name is Dan Bertholomey, and I was injured in a hit and run that has left me without the use of my right hand, and I can’t imagine life without my X-Box 360. I’m very interested in purchasing a one-handed controller. Let me know what I can do, and thank you for all you do. God Bless. That should be easier than falling off a log in the rain, now I will go call Dan and brainstorm what he needs.”

“Dan: Hi Ben, thanks for calling.”

“Ben: No problem, thanks for submitting your request.”

“Dan: I need to figure out a way to play without using my right arm. I can’t imagine not being able to play videogames anymore.”

“Ben: Foot pedals to take over some of the functions?”

“Dan: Yeah, definitely – I was doing some thought on that and you could even have say one pedal, the right pedal kind of mimic the controller Y, A, B, and X buttons. Like have a four-way pedal, you know?”

“Ben: Okay, I will write that down - a four-way pedal. Holding this controller in my left hand I can do left control stick, left bumper and the left trigger, and the D pad. So what I think we should mostly think about is moving right trigger, right bumper, A, B, X, Y, and the right analog stick. Now, one thing I have done in the past with the secondary analog stick is I stick it to the bottom of the controller. One of them, so you activate the other analog stick by pushing the controller against your knee, and then you move the controller against your knee and that moves the analog stick. Does that make sense?”

“Dan: The new Madden comes out August 15^th.”

“Ben: Okay, I don’t think we will have any problem getting it done by then.”

“Dan: I am originally from Chicago so, I knew that would ruin the deal if I mentioned that. You know how that is with the Packers and the Bears.”

“Ben: Well, the Bears haven’t really been a threat in quite a while, so I don’t know if it is much of a war anymore. Okay, well I think I have enough information here to get started. So, I will keep you posted on the build and we will get this out to you as soon as we can.”

“Dan: I just want to thank you, seriously – from the bottom of my heart for what you’re doing for me.”

“Ben: One thing you want to look for when you are modifying an X-Box 360 controller is this little plus and minus sign inside the battery compartment. It is clearly visible. This indicates that this is a modern X-Box controller, not one of the older X-Box 360 controllers which had two different connections per button, and were a lot harder to wire up. These newer controller are very simple, it’s just signal and ground per button and it is a lot easier to work with. Okay, well we have an X-Box 360 controller here. First thing to think about is the fact that it has these little security screws.

Just get a really small flathead screwdriver and it will allow you to just kind of slip in the side of the security pin and remove the screws anyway. Well, so much for security. On all X-Box controllers it is pretty common – there is a signal line and a ground for each one of the buttons. So, we are just going to use an X-Acto knife and go side by side using the flat of the blade on these little pads to reveal copper. You basically just need enough to solder to. That is something else we can do in here, we can scratch off one of the bottom pads, so we have a ground connection. So we add a little bit of solder to the points we want to disconnect, which helps the solder re-flow and then we can remove it with the de-soldering iron. The de-soldering iron is pretty simple, it’s just a 40-watt iron with a suction bulb. So you push out all the air, put it down over the part, swirl it around – let it heat up, and thwump, it sucks up all the solder.

It makes that noise too, thwump, thwump. We can repeat the procedure for the right analog stick, just heat up all of the connections with some more solder. A good sign that you have de-soldered something correctly is that you can see black expanse around the pins. So that shows you that they are ready to go. Also, if you can move the pins with a screwdriver, that also means you probably de-soldered. And, once you’ve got the piece de-soldered, go ahead and just stick a screwdriver in and whook – pop it off. To connect the wires going to the pedals, we are going to use something called a header. Now this is a point 1 inch header, which means it is point 1 inch between each pin. It is a pretty common size.

The other common size is a 2mm pin header, which is slightly smaller. Now, this header has 8 pins, which should be enough because we have A, B, X, Y, right bumper, ground, voltage and then trigger sense. So, this 8 pin header will cover it all. So, what we are going to do here is cut off enough of this ribbon cable so we can attach it to this. I really like to use an X-Acto knife to do this – you take the X-Acto knife and cut between them. That way you get an accurate count. You know, someone might say you should be wiser to your teeth - that’s terrible. How could you do such a thing? But in reality, it’s not nearly as bad for your teeth as drinking soda, or forgetting to floss. Alright, now that we have the header connected, we are going to stick it right here on the circuit board. So what I am going to do is take my Dremel, scuff up the bottom of it, then use our good – good friend super glue. A little dab will do you, but a big dab will really do you.

Then we basically go – squeck. Alright, so now we have attached the header and all the wires to the buttons. As you can see here, the wires have been soldered in the order in which they came off the header – which just makes it looks nicer and also makes it flatter and more compact. We have written down what the pin-out is so we will remember it later after we have closed up the controller. That’s enough for now, I have to take a break.”

“Ben: Now we are going to take a quick break from the Viewer Challenge and start on the Big Build. As I had mentioned earlier, we will be modifying an X-Box 360 into a laptop which we will be giving away to one lucky viewer, once it’s complete. Visit my page on element14.com for more details. Okay, let’s get started. I am here with my friend, Kurt Kressin.”

“Kurt: Hello.”

“Ben: Who is going to help me disassembling this new X-Box 360. We don’t need this.”

“Kurt: Here we go.”

“Ben: Look at that thing.”

“Kurt: Wow.”

“Ben: Ohhh, alright how do you think we should take this thing apart? Let’s take the hard-drive out first.”

“Kurt: Nice.”

“Ben: Smells new, I like it.”

“Kurt: I feel like these chrome ends would come off.”

“Ben: Oh yeah, maybe there are tabs.”

“Kurt: Oh yeah, that feels loose. Oh, look at that.”

“Ben: Oh, oh.”

“Kurt: There we go.”

“Ben: We’ve got this guy.”

“Kurt: Yeah buddy.”

“Ben: It’s a good thing they put vent holes in this X-Box.”

“Kurt: It’s going to start sweating pretty soon.”

“Ben: That’s true, it’s going to make you sweat like C &C Music Factory.”

“Kurt: Yeah, buddy. There are some electronics there.”

“Ben: That is the WiFi Module. Look how easily they can make an X-Box version without the WiFi insert, very easily.”

“Kurt: Nice, the face-plate is removable after all.”

“Ben: It is handy the way that all connects to the ring-of-light. Less wiring later on, Oh, there it is.”

“Kurt: Wow.”

“Ben: Look at that nice fan.”

“Kurt: Holy cow.”

“Ben: All SATA drive connectors, so that’s nice. We can just use SATA connectors to hook up the hard-drive. It will be a lot simpler. As usual, this is held in with mechanical retention. It’s cheaper than screws. Yep, so these are attached to some of the components. In order to get the bottom RFC Shield off, we have to release these. This thing should…”

“Kurt: Drop right out.”

“Ben: Stop, drop and roll. This is the power for the DVD, oh – it is held in place with tape. Nice.”

“Kurt: Double stick tape, got to love it. Oh, look at that heat-sync.”

“Ben: Oh yeah, and it’s nice and flat which means it will be easy to make this into a portable. It may seem like I am rough with this stuff, but I am also gentle. There it is. The X Clamp – it’s back. Alright, so now that we have the X-Box all apart – you see how this is a nice little fan assembly, like why change it? I am just going to leave that fan assembly as is and change all the parts around it. If this is the user over here, put the disc drive here, put the hard drive here – kind of like how it was originally. Put some circuitry here, put the power supply brick here. Can you kind of picture that?”

“Kurt: Nice, do you need to have the shroud around the fan to point the air in a certain direction?”

“Ben: Well, I don’t think so. The fan already has like a wall around it, I think that should be good. But I will put alternate air holes in it, so the air can come in all sorts of directions and be spit out this way. It will be a lot like the PlayStation 3 slim laptop I made. Well, we have gotten everything taken apart – so I guess the next step will be to design it into the computer and make a case around it.”

“Ben: Okay, we’re back. Now, we’ve gotten most of the internal circuitry for the single handed controller down. So the next thing to do is think about the foot pedal. We will start with the left foot, it is going to have two functions. It is going to have right trigger, which is going to be this. And then there is going to be a thing up here, which you push your foot up to click for right bumper. Okay, now the right analog trigger is analog and how it appears in the 360 is you have a potentiometer like this – the trigger is here. So basically, when you push the trigger, the potentiometer rotates this way. And on a potentiometer, you’ve got the wiper and then the two poles.

This one goes to ground and this one goes to a voltage – it is called VCC. So what we can do to simulate this trigger being pushed is we can short out these two things. So basically it will be like Pow – all the way over. So we will attach those to a switch that will be this switch right here. Okay, let’s move on to the right foot. Okay, so you’ve got a pedal here. Now that is going to be the easiest pedal to push, so we are going to make that the most common button – A. Then flanking it will be two side pedals, here and here. And that will be X and B. Now as you can see this is shaped like the quadrant buttons on the X-Box 360. Finally, there will be a top pedal portion here which will be Y and we will put that up the same way as we did the right bumper on the other controller.

Alright, we start out by making an outline around the feet so we have an idea of where we are going to put things. We can kind of test the concept with a shoe here. Yeah, that seems to work. Then we lay down a strip of wood, this allows the small of the feet to rest on it so you can click in with your toes on the snap-action switches. We put these up here at the tip so the pieces of aluminum which will act as the pedals will push down on them. But first, there is a spring to give it a little more force and tension. That way its not too easy to click it. Then we add some felt to the aluminum pieces and stick it in place, which gives it a nice soft feel. Also, it makes it look better than a piece of wood. This is left and right, and you know you have to take a break every so often and play videogames. Make sure that everything is working. Ohh, nice pass. Okay, when you click up you hit that snap action as you can see there.

There are left and right side switches, as we described for X and B. As you can see we have all the switches here, so we are ready to move on. Here is where the switches plug into the controller. That way you can detach it with ease. There is also another button here for the left bumper. Okay, so basically we are changing the position of the analog stick. So we have to make sure all the pin-outs are the same. As long as we keep track of them, we should be good. We’ve got ground, wiper and VCC for each of the directions – up and down, X and Y. Then we just solder all the connections in place and use some heat-shrink tubing to keep it isolated. Okay, with the controller done I am going to take it over to my friend, Jones’ house, so I can test it out before I ship it to Dan. Jones.”

“Jason: Yes.”

“Ben: I am here to show you how this works.”

“Jason: What is that and how did it get into my living room in the first place?”

“Ben: It found a way.”

“Jason: Man the Jets aren’t messing around here today.”

“Ben: We’ve got to get rid of it quick.”

“Jason: You just lob it out to the B guy.”

“Ben: Okay. B – oh.”

“Jason: Oh, you waited too long.”

“Ben: Oh, he got it. That was a good call Jones.”

“Jason: Yeah, that Jets guy is just horrible though.”

“Ben: Well we made it through my first episode and I still have all 10 fingers. Join us next time when we build a portable CNC machine and start designing the shell for the X-Box 360 laptop. See you then.”

The Ben Heck Show was made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today – visit element14.com. Visit their community and The Ben Heck Show group using the URL below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.

Tags: xbox360, mods, build_challenge, Design Resources, ben_heck

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 3: Ben Builds an Automatic Can Crusher…or dose he?

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:51:10 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:51:10 PM

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by, element 14 - the electronic design community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. Join now and browse the store at element14.com.

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 to create new projects. If you’ve got an idea you would like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

“Ben: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show. If you are anything like me, you probably have piles and piles of pop cans or soda cans, depending on where you live, laying all over your house. What can be done to stop the madness? When will it end?”

“Ben: Well, the human race is in luck because today’s Viewer Challenge comes from the Longhorn Engineer who writes: ‘Hey Ben Heck, this is the Longhorn Engineer - aka Rekarp from your forums. Can you build an awesome automatic can crusher? I’d even come up to help. It could be solenoid powered and even have a readout of how many cans you have crushed.’ Could this end the world’s soda can crisis once and for all? I should contact this guy and see what he is thinking with this solenoid powered idea.”

“Ben: Longhorn Engineer on-screen. So what is this solenoid idea you told me about?”

“Longhorn: Basically you make a big solenoid - like in a pinball machine, and then crush a can.”

“Ben: Can you draw what you’re thinking of?”

“Longhorn: Let’s see. Something like that. So you would have your solenoid right here, it would fire along and hit the can right there.”

“Ben: Oh, okay. Can you tell us the theory behind the solenoid?”

“Longhorn: Basically it’s just a whole bunch of wire that is wrapped around a coil, once you apply current through it and it is drawn through in this rod here that shoots the rod through.”

“Ben: Well okay, why don’t you come on up here to Wisconsin and we will put this thing together.”

“Longhorn: Okay.”

“Ben: See you next Wednesday.”

“Parker: Hey Ben, what’s going on?”

“Ben: Hey, Parker. You made it up from Texas?”

“Parker: Yes I did.”

“Ben: Did you bring your stuff?”

“Parker: The stuff is right here.”

“Ben: Alright, let’s take a look. Ah, looks good. Alright, let’s build this automatic can crusher. Step right in.”

“Parker: Thank you Ben.”

“Ben: Alright, I will just leave that there for now.”

“Ben: Parker, can you explain what you are doing here?”

“Parker: This is our test solenoid set up, that I have been working on for the past couple of weeks. So we have a coil there of wire, we have our bank of capacitors and our rectifier to turn the AC voltage to DC voltage. Basically I want to touch this wire to that wire and this rod is going to shut through and crumple the can. Okay, ready - three, two, one.”

“Ben: Parker, what happened in here - it is like super dark.”

“Parker: Do have breakers, Ben?”

“Ben: Yeah, here they are. Ah, let there be light. Are you sure that is going to work?”

“Parker: It should if you get it hot enough. We have to cool this thing down fast.”

“Ben: Okay for our next test, we have mounted the solenoid into a very high-tech bracket, as you can see. It is similar to how a pinball solenoid is mounted. Parker, prepare for test two.”

“Parker: Test two, so we the solenoid mounted, the can with a hole in it, and the rod set up. So we are going to put this over it to hopefully contain any shrapnel that flies out. Fire!!”

“Ben: Oh, we are getting there.”

“Parker: Much better than the first attempt.”

“Ben: That Pepsi can has seen hard life.”

“Ben: Okay, so we used the test solenoid and it kind of did its job, but it needs to its job better. So now we are going to make a new solenoid that is even longer and more deadly. The gold here is to make the new solenoid the same thickness as the old one, but longer in length. We hope this will give the crushing rod more momentum and power. We will measure the diameter of the old coil and make marks on the new tube so we will know when to stop winding. So, how’s it going over there Parker?”

“Parker: It’s going okay. This is fun, I guess.”

“Ben: By the time we get this finished winding, there will probably a huge size of pop can and it won’t fit and we will be like - nooooo.”

“Parker: Everyone will just have plastic by then.”

“Ben: Here is the old solenoid, it was wound poorly. Here is the new one we just wound while watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. As you remember, we made the marks to figure out how big to wind it but we see before we add more wire - we are going to see if it works with just this much wire. Here we go!”

“Parker: Are you ready?”

“Ben: Yes.”

“Parker: Close your eyes.”

“Ben: Ohhhh!”

“Parker: That sounded good.”

“Ben: Today is day 2, now you remember we made those marks on the coil here to figure out how thick we had to wind it. Now we have wound it all the way - we had to actually link the wire at one point. We are ready for the test to see if we can actually get the plunger to pull in far enough to crush the can.”

“Parker: On, charge, fire!”

“Ben: Alright, let’s take a look. It isn’t crushed that much more. Maybe it is time to think about a mechanical solution.”

“Parker: Yeah I think that is the way to do it now.”

“Ben: Yeah.”

“Parker: It’s just no feasible in terms of how much power it takes and controlling it.”

“Ben: Some things are better left beyond human hands.”

“Parker: Yes.”

“Ben: Now let’s take a break from the Viewer Challenge to work on the X-Box 360 laptop some more. If you have been watching the last few episodes, you know that we are taking an X-Box 360 game console and turning it into portable laptop form. On today’s episode we are going to be routing out the parts to make the case and then putting it together.”

“Ben: Alright, well now we are going to route off the curved lid tops for the X-Box 360 laptops. Actually it is more than a curve, we are going to use this curved bit to do it. See the nice 3/4 inch there? But the problem is, the material is 3/4 inch - the bit is actually longer than that. So see we would be digging into the table past this edge. To solve that problem, we are going to use some cheap sacrificial foam, tape it to the material you want to cut. That way when the bit cuts all the way down, it just eats into the section of foam and the table will be safe.

So as you can see, the bit went down into the blue sacrificial foam giving us a great nice curve. So sometimes it is worth it to waste $2.00 worth of insulation foam in order to cut the material the way you like it. So now I can cut out the inside of those pieces. So we line up three of them on a sheet again, this time we are going to use a 2 x 4 piece of the sacrificial foam. This time we are going to use it as a jig. What we are going to do is, we cut out this shape here inside the jig so we have a place to stick the blank piece. That and when we stick them all in they are held in place by the vacuum and the retention of the foam all around them.

Then we can carve out the insides. Okay, as you can see here - we have grooved all of the walls into one sheet of 2 ft. x 2 ft. Even though splitting the walls into pieces makes it easier to cut more of them, it is still kind of important to place them all on the board. Not only do you have to place them, you have to make sure that you can get a picture of them - we are doing an outline. So as you can see, it should fit.”

The big CNC machine is great for cutting out large things, but for smaller - more intricate parts, it is best to use a laser-cutter or laser-engraver. I used one to do the detailed sections on a unit such of as the ‘ring-of-light’, the buttons and the vent-holes. As you can see, it cuts out pretty nicely and it’s almost like magic. Now comes the lame part, sanding.

“Parker: Playing Bill Paxton is so much fun.”

“Ben: Parker, this game looks awesome but I have some fun stuff for us to do.”

“Parker: More fun than Paxton.”

“Ben: It’s even more fun than this pinball game, come on.”

“Parker: Let’s do it. This isn’t fun at all.”

“Ben: If you keep complaining I am not going to let you white-wash the fence later. So these pieces came off the router and as you can see there, they are not perfect. Even though we used a computer to route these, there is still a lot of hand-labor required to make it look nice. We have most of the pieces ready to go, don’t we?”

“Parker: Yeah, I’m almost done.”

“Ben: Alright - cool, we can start putting it together now. Okay, so now we have the pieces all sanded and it was totally fun, wasn’t it Parker?”

“Parker: Almost as fun as wrapping that solenoid.”

“Ben: So we are going to use the drawings here to piece together the parts of the plastic. Okay, so that is the bottom half of it. We have the thing that holds the screen, it goes right here. Then we have the screen lid. There is a depression here to allow the circuitry on the back of the screen to fit. This part is basically kind of heavy because there is a lot of mass left to it, but that’s alright.”

“Parker: It makes it more sterdier.”

“Ben: Here is the USB access. These holes here, this one is just an extra vent - this one actually allows you to remove the hard drives. That is what that is all about. Then on the back you have the power plug, and this is where the cord comes out for the HDMI connection. If you had the case come apart like this, like this was the bottom and there was a layer up here that came apart - you would need a screw about this long for it to work and it would cost a lot more than these little ½ inch screws. That is why I put the separation down here.

It is a stormy day outside. Now I am going to glue these pieces together, and the big thing is to try and get it as flush as possible. Also, I want to make sure the glue is going to stick so I am going to rough this up a little bit. I love super glue, super glue is so awesome. Sometimes it sticks to flesh really easily. The reason it does is because super glue is activated by water, so when it comes in contact with water - such as the skin which is made of water. That is why it sticks so fast. Alright, now we are going to attach these laser-cut plates to here. See how it goes right there, it lines up and creates the main-face of the unit.”

“Ben: That was fun and don’t worry, my finger survived. In the next episode, we will start putting electronics into the case. We now return to our regular can crushing project.”

“Ben: Okay, we are back. Now we are going to try a mechanical solution to get the cans to crush. As you can see here, I have a little rig going - I have an off the shelf can crusher. I’ve got cord. I’ve got a separate motor, right here and it has a timing belt that goes up to this larger thing here. This will give us a 3:1 reduction or torque. The lever on this, being 11 inches long, gives us even more torque. Okay, now what we are going to do is we are going to run the separate motor a little bit at a time using a micro-controller, like we discussed in the last episode. It will run about 35% a revolution, plug this cord a little bit at a time so we can control it. So we are going to power up this separate motor driver, when I push reset on this micro-processor it is going to start to pull the pulley. Let’s watch it go. There we go. Okay, it was very rough but as you can see we proved a separate motor can crush a can. So now what we have to do is look at this rig and see how we can build the can crusher around it using this theory of operation.”

“Ben: Alright, we are here with math expert Jason Jones.”

“Jason: How’s it going?”

“Ben: He is going to help me figure out this gear ratio thing so we can at least get a theory of operation of how to get the can crusher to work, even if we are not going to have enough time to finish it on this episode. So we’ve got a separate motor there, then we have a larger pulley, and we’ve got the belt. The belt is a lot cheaper than two big gears. So, this one has three times as many teeth as this one. So that gives it a 3:1 reduction. Does that make sense? You are a car guy, you should know about this.”

“Jason: Kind of.”

“Ben: You need to get a stick shift, what is wrong with you?”

“Jason: I don’t know, I am lazy when it comes to driving.”

“Ben: It’s like breathing after a while, you never think about it. So the separate motor drives this, which gives this gearing reduction. Then we have the can crusher over here which is pulled from this position to this position. This distance here is 11 inches. So if that’s the radius, the whole circle of that - if this was a gear, it would be 22. If we had a piston here and a big gear here that was driven by the separate motor, what is this reduction? What does this have to be? If 3:1 is the difference between this and this, but this thing - the diameter of it is basically 2. So wouldn’t that be 11:1?”

“Jason: I see what you are saying., okay.”

“Ben: From this to this?”

“Jason: So it would be 33.”

“Ben: Okay, so we need 33:1.”

“Jason: You confuse me with your Ben-gineering.”

“Ben: A worm-gear.”

“Jason: Awesome.”

“Ben: Yeah.”

“Jason: So how does that work?”

“Ben: You have this and then the worm-gear is up here, which is kind of like this threaded rod that just happens to be on the floor. Picture that, and its driven by a motor here. A one gear has a high reduction ratio, so it is very easy to find one that is like 30:1. So this does 30 revolutions here before this even does one revolution.”

“Jason: Oh, alright.”

“Ben: So what you could do is drive this directly, basically worm-gear here - this turns it and rotates this, this way. So then what you could do is you could make kind of like a piston chamber, like this - kind of like on a locomotive. So this turns and it goes - errt. So when this turns it goes - kapootch, kapootch. Get it?”

“Jason: Yeah.”

“Ben: Crushing the can here.”

“Jason: Oh.”

“Ben: Only I am not sure how fast it would be, it might not be that fast.”

“Jason: But it would be a much smaller size.”

“Ben: Oh yeah, they would be smaller than this even. The ultimate goal is to make something you can fit on the wall.”

“Jason: You redid your basement, what is it 18 inches.”

“Ben: Something like that.”

“Jason: Roughly, yeah.”

“Ben: I just used a stud-finder.”

“Ben: Well, come to think of it - when we did the CNC machine episode - we realized it took about 10 revolutions of the separate motor to drive the machine one inch. So to have a 30:1 worm-gear, we would have to do 30 revolutions to make the worm-gear rotate once. So we would be looking at roughly one can crushed every three seconds, which really wouldn’t be that fast. So now I post it to you the viewers, do you have any good suggestions? Should we try some servo-motors? Do you have any kinds of servo-motors we could try? Can you suggest something? I want to hear from you.”

“Ben: Well, the can crusher didn’t work out quite as well as I had hoped. But at least we got the X-Box 360 laptop case built, and it is coming along. Be sure to tune in next time when we build a portal costume for Halloween. A see-through shirt, woooooooo - based off the hit game. We will see you then.”

The Ben Heck Show is made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects, and for a list of all the parts I used today - visit element14.com. Visit their community and The Ben Heck Show using the URL below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.”

Tags: mods, automatic, crusher, build_challenge, Design Resources, ben_heck, can

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 5: Ben builds a custom Dual-Positioned Coach Laptop

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:48:27 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:48:27 PM

The Ben Heck show is brought to you by Element 14, the product design community and online store for engineers and hobbyists alike. Join now and browse the store and element14.com.

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 have an idea you would like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

“Ben: Hello and welcome back to the Beck Heck show. Now in this episode, we are going to do things a little differently. There is not going to be a viewer challenge, instead we are going to work on a project that I have been wanting to build for several years now.

Let me explain the idea behind it. As many of you are no doubt aware, it is quite difficult to fully open a standard laptop computer on an airplane. If the person in front of you leans their seat back at all, it becomes mostly impossible. My intention is to modify a laptop in such a way that the screen can be positioned above the keyboard while allowing you a great view and comfortable typing.

To do this we will hack-up the LCD portion of a laptop, build it into a new enclosure with custom mounting arms for it. Let’s get started.”

“Ben: We’ve got a Toshiba laptop here. I don’t need that. These are eerily familiar to the coffin padding they used to have in the X-Box 360. There is no webcam or anything else up here on the screen so there should be minimal amounts of components for us to rewire. One of the reasons I picked this model, besides it being cheap, was I can see the very obvious screw-holes.

See that? Alright, the frame comes off pretty easy, it just kind of flips around. Now we can see the friction-hinges here, which cause it to go back and forth. The back lid is not held on by anything, really. It appears to be a metal sub-frame actually holding the LCD in place. This part here where the data comes in, this is basically where the magic happens on the LCD.

It is also one of the more fragile parts. See how it connects to the glass in these spots? So you want to be very gentle around here. It is actually an LED back-lit LCD screen, which is pretty impressive considering how cheap it was. See the power right there going to the LED lighting?”

“Ben: This kind of shows the proof of concept. I have removed the LCD from the arms and rested it on the end of the arms. The reason I did that was to see if the arms have enough strength to hold the full weight of the LCD at the end of the arms rather than with the weight spread across them. And as you can see, they do.

The LCD with the LED back-lit is really quite light, so it is actually going to be in the unit kind of like this. So, now we can see how far to extend the cable. I have carefully sliced apart the data cable going into the top of the LCD on the laptop. It might look like a big mess, but it actually is not too bad. In the olden days, the computers would have flat-flex ribbing cable going and curling up around the engine and going up to the LCD.

You really couldn’t do anything with it, but this we can actually, believe it or not, hack up and extend. Now I want to go slow with the hack on this. So I have cut one of the wires for the video connection and I am going to pointlessly extend it. This will show me two things: A.) if I can wire things to extend the wires, and B.) if extending the wires will affect performance. It shouldn’t, but I am going to test it a little before I test it a lot. There are the redone connections, here is the twisted pair represented as a long piece of ribbon cable. This is longer than we need, so let’s test it.

Oh no, we seem to have lost image and the reflection on the screen doesn’t count. Okay, now it is working. What we did differently was use some thin solid strand of cabling, such as what you would find on an alter ATA card-drive. You have to use the thin wire, which looks like this. Quite often if you try to rewire high-speed suited devices with stranded thicker ribbon cable, like what we tried first, it won’t work.”

“Ben: It is going slowly. I am extending all of the wires you can see here, but I can only extend them one or two at a time because if you use the wrong thickness wire, like single-strand instead of stranded – it causes it not to work. As you can see here, I had to use the thicker wire to keep the LCD back-lighting working. It is going slowly, but that is the thing, only make one or two modifications at a time – test, more modifications – test, more modifications – test.

That way you can rewind one step, like an undo button and find out where the problem was. If you hack too much at once, we will never know where the problem was. We will end up redoing everything to possibly just fix one thing. The wire has now been extended, so now we can work at making the new bracket. Alright, here it a test, here is the jerk in front of me who leans his seat back – but in this configuration I can see the screen and have it fully open even with this that close.” “I am on a fake plane.”

“Ben: Let’s take a break from this project to work on another laptop project, the Xbox 360. In this episode, we are going to be rewiring some things on the mother-board so we can fit it better into the case.”

“Ben: What we need to do is rewire some of the components on it so it will fit better. If you take a look at the board, you see some obvious things that jot out and need to be replaced. The rind-of-light assembly here, the wireless adapter back here – those are two most obvious ones. Now luckily, these both unplug so they are meant to be removed, which means we can remove them easily and rewire the connectors. Zoom in on that, magnify, clean it up a little.

Notice that not all the connectors are the same, there are actually two grounds, so that means we don’t actually have to re-hookup everything – just the discrete connections. To make it easier to solder wires to this, I am going to add some lead solder to each of these points. We have attached some wires to the wireless connector here. Now we have plugged the wireless connector back into the mother-board so we can double-check the connections. Here is how we are going to do it. Okay, that is pin one, so we know this red one goes here.

It is good to double-check this stuff, hook it back up in its original configuration then rewire it slowly so you know you are doing it exactly right. Now, we are going to put some Velcro here so we can mount the wire. Next up is the ring-of-light. It is a similar procedure except there are more wires. What we are going to do is cut the ribbon-cable in such a way that it will go between the lower pins and reach up to the bottom pins. That way it is flat. The connector has 7 + 6 rows, so 13 total pins. But, I am actually superstitious enough to add an extra ground to make it an even 14.

So, we are going to separate the wires. One down, one up, one down, one up then we are going to cut the bottom row of 7 shorter. Now the green stuff on the circuit-board is called solder-mask. It is to mask the solder to only go in the spots you want it. When doing connections like these, don’t worry if your wires and pins overlap or even touch the surface of the circuit-board.

As long as there is solder-mask there, the green stuff, it won’t short-circuit anything. Next, we estimate on how long to make the cable. We do this by taking our frame - the ring-of-light goes there. It has to reach here-ish, about that long. Take our ribbon cable from the ring-of-light and solder it to a header. You may remember us doing this in Episode 1 when we made that controller. Always build things you can take apart because if you build something you can’t take apart, then chances are it won’t work. You will have to take it apart and you won’t be able to and you will be sitting there slicing apart hot-glue and cursing to the heavens above.

Once again, we plug the item into the X-Box so we can verify that we have hooked it up correctly. This connector here is where the touch-sensitive buttons were on the front face-plate. Now those are all well and good, but I would rather just use tacks, so let’s see if we can deduce how this works. I have taken this wire and hooked it up to ground, because that is usually how everything works. It is either ground - zero or voltage – one. So, I think this one here, yep – okay. That one is power, so if we touch a switch to that pin there and pull it ground it will turn on the unit. And I believe two over is eject, yep. Bingo. Here we have attached a wire for the buttons we are going to add later on. So we have power, eject, sync, and then ground.

So, that is how that works. Okay, I have tested them all and they are all good. So now we can move on to the next part, the hard-drive and optical-drive. This is how the DVD drive is placed in the actual unit. As you can see it has a power cord here, and then also a SATA plug. Now, we can get replacement SATA cord to extend that. But if we want to move this drive over here, we are going to have to manually make this cord longer. Now it is custom, but you can just Google X-Box DVD power connector and find the pin-out.

So basically, we just have to extend this from here to here and just wire up the connections we need. This thing contains ground, 12 volts, 5 volts, 3.3 volts, tray-status, and then another pin to make the tray open and close. The DVD cable has been extended so the drive can put on the side. Now it is time to work on the hard-drive. Alright, let’s put in the SATA hard-drive. It will go right about here. Then you have to plug it into the left hole because that is the one for the hard-drive. Oh crap, it is just barely too short. So, I am actually going to have to extend this using left-over SATA from the DVD drive.

DVD SATA is going to be right here, the one for the hard-drive has to come around like this. So, we have to make the connection here. Here are the insides of the SATA cables. There are two pair, A and B, each one has two ground on either side and the two wires in the center are the positive and minus data. You can think of it as two sets of USB connections.

What we are going to do is basically re-hook all of these back up and keep them isolated. You only need the grounds once, but it is good to make sure you have everything hooked up, just to make sure. It also helps to keep it straight and inline. The SATA connection is done. Don’t worry, I guarantee it will work. Okay, let’s see if it works. I am powering up the little screen. Wow, look at that – HD resolution. Can you believe it?”

“Ben: We are just about there with the X-Box 360 laptop. In the next episode, we will be putting it into the case, adding sound, power and finishing it. Now, let’s get back to the coach-section laptop.”

“Ben: This may look like a simple rod, but to me it is more. It is now a patented center of gravity detector. That is pretty good - I am going to mark it off as the center of gravity. Once we know where the center of gravity is, we can design the case around it. Now, there are three basic parts. There is the frame or the arm that holds the screen assembly, there is the top lid which encloses it and has a neat graphic, and then there is the front frame which actually goes around the LCD.

So, we are going to take these designs in to get CNC and then I am going to take the parts to my friend Mike’s house and we will put it together. We are back to the main build. Now as you can see here, we have routed a few pieces, it is fairly simple. We are basically making a screen frame. So we have got these two things here, which are going to give depth around the screen. Then we have some plates that will hold the screen in place. We are going to just sand the edges here so we can glue the frame to it. I always want to sand things before I glue it because it gives more surface area for the glue to stick to.

Now, we are going to use super-glue on this. Super-glue is pretty good stuff, it is cheap and it works great. Now I am doing it this way so that I can see if there is any overhang. The LCD in a laptop is kind of like the windshield in a car, it actually provides a lot of the structural strength. This is pretty flimsy obviously, so is a laptop screen area when you take the LCD out. If we make sure the LCD is held firmly to the frame, it will give the frame support rather than the frame actually giving it support because the LCD is a solid piece of glass. We are going to put the screen in place, and then we are going to glue this in place. That way we know it fits.

As you can see, it is pretty firm because the LCD is stuck to the frame, so it gives it strength. Alright, my cheap mounting method is this: the bracket is here - this thumb-screw goes through the hole and attaches the two positions of the screen using these nuts. So basically, you hand-tighten it into the nut like that. So we have to adhere these nuts somehow, so what I am going to do is glue them in place using super-glue and then reinforcing it with J-B Weld, but I have to make some surface area so the glue will stick. Oh yeah.

Alright, I am using this J-B Weld, even though this is J-B Kwik, it is just like J-B Weld – it’s just that is quick. It is a two-part epoxy, it is great. If you have never used it, you should get it. Okay, so we put these nuts in here and they will receive the thumb-screws. So what I did was super-glue kind of put them in place, now I am using J-B Kwik to keep them in place. Mike, you have to be quick with that J-B Kwik - hurry.”

“Mike: I am not that quick.”

“Ben: Oh man, time is wasting. We are coming to a problem here, the hole in the bracket doesn’t quite line up with the nut. So we can either move the hole a little bit or shave off this bracket. To make up for the misalignment, Mike has put a little tap-hole in here. Mike did the fix-work.”

“Mike: I think it worked.”

“Ben: Yes, you saved us dollars upon dollars of routing time. A useful tool when working with screws is called a tap. Basically it is a thing that you screw in and it makes the screw holes in the object for you, so when you put the screw in – it goes easily. I have forgotten my tap, so I am having to manually torque this through the piece to make the threads. Mike, this is amazing. You are screwing that easily by twisting the piece around the screw rather than twisting the screw into the piece. What is this an example of?”

“Mike: I made a crude-lever. It is one of the 7 simple machines.”

“Ben: Uh huh, so now here comes the un-cool part. As you can see, the screw goes all the way through. It is too long, so we are going to have to dremel the screw shorter. This lights up when the screen does, so I can make a free back-lit section. I need to protect this first, so I am going to go “green” and recycle. If you have something like a piece of plastic like this memory came in, it is like gold. Look at this, free plastic. Put it against this text here so these letters will stay in place. Got some spray adhesive, you don’t need much.

It is possible we may have put too much J-B Weld on, and by possible I mean we did put too much on. So I am going to shave it down so the lid fits. Alright, so we have the frame and it attaches to the laptop – these match up there, see. So now we have to bolt these together, slip the ribbon cable through the back of this, and then screw this in place. Alright, Mike is going to attach the brackets to the friction-hinges and then we will reattach the brackets to the screen portion and we should be ready to go. And now, we remove the transfer tape to reveal the fine full-wood exterior. Wood paneling, it is not just for your upbeat home of the 70’s anymore.

These knob screws we used here is obviously a design flaw, we should have used a bigger turn-key screw because you really can’t do these by hand. Once we add those, it is going to be a lot easier to do. Now if you move the screw out to this position, you can actually still use it as a regular laptop. See? So it can still open as a regular laptop, it does both things. I think what we can do in the future is we could improve how the brackets work so it is easier to slide. We just used these screws here because it was the quickest way to prove the concept. It is the dual-position, coach laptop. You can use it like a regular laptop, or it can work in airplane mode.”

“Ben: That is all the time we have for today. Be sure to catch our next episode where we will modify a bunch of rock band equipment and also finish the X-Box 360 laptop. We will see you then.”

The Ben Heck show was made possible by our sponsors at Element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today – visit element14.com. Visit their community and the Ben Heck Show group using the URL shown below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.

Tags: Design Resources, ben_heck

(TRANSCRIPT) The Ben Heck Show - Episode 4: Ben Builds a Portal Shirt for Halloween

joeman — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:48:27 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by joeman on 11/9/2021 4:48:27 PM

The Ben Heck Show is brought to you by, element 14 - the electronic design community and online store built for engineers and hobbyists alike. Join now and browse the store at element14.com.

“Ben: Greetings my friends, you are here because you are interested in the unknown - the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now for the first time ever, we bring you the full story of how to build a see-through portal t-shirt right here on The Ben Heck Show.”

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 would like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.

“Ben: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show. On today’s episode, we are going to... hold on - getting a call. Hello.”

“Jason: Hey man, it’s your friend Jason Jones. Are you still doing that show?”

“Ben: Yeah, actually I am recording it right now.”

“Jason: Sweet, hey - I was thinking, you should do a see-through portal shirt based off the classic game also called Portal. You know the one with the cake that lies.”

“Ben: You know that actually sounds like a pretty cool idea, it would be great for a Halloween costume or maybe something to wear to game convention.”

“Jason: Nice, well I will let you get to it then.”

“Ben: Oh no, you are coming over here and helping.”

“Jason: Noooooooooooooooooooooo!”

A little background - Portal was a video game created by Valve in 2007, the premise of the game was your character shot these portals, or doors, through materials and she could travel through them to solve puzzles. Our idea is to create a t-shirt/costume that will replicate this idea in a fun and exciting way.”

“Ben: Okay, let’s take a look at the theory of operation for this project. Okay, here is our subject - they have got on a white t-shirt, I picked white because it will kind of look like the environment in Portal. There is going to be a portal here in the center, and what we are going to do is we will be able to see through the shirt. So if there are some mountains, or bar-goers, or festival-goers, or whatever behind this person - you will see it through the shirt.

Okay, here is a side view of the person’s torso. The plan is to have an LCD screen here, the largest we can get and still have it be something that you can fit on your chest. It will be here and it will be projecting the image that is captured by a little CCD camera back here. So, light comes in and goes right through the person. And then down here, you’ve got the battery pack that will power it - probably 12 volts. You want something that will last maybe 3 hours. The person can turn it on and off when need be, but this is the basic system: camera, battery, LCD.”

“Ben: Okay, well here is the camera we got - it’s the Defender Security. Alright, so let’s take a look at this. A cord assembly, power and video. This is what is going to go to the LCD and this is what goes to the power supply. Power is almost always red and it almost always 5 volts. Yellow can sometimes mean 12 volts, but in this case we know that it means video. Okay, here is the CCD camera itself, it actually looks very similar to what’s in the X-Box 360 - the little vision cameras. See, it is just a little camera package all-in-one, so this will be pretty easy for us. It even has a lens cap.

This screw here, let’s try that - yep, that is what changes the focus. Okay, now it is time to test this little camera. I didn’t have the right adapter to go from this plug to a standard RCA, so I just hooked it up using some jumpers. I didn’t hack it up yet just in case this thing isn’t working. I want to still be able to return it or use it for something else. For a power supply, it needs 12 volts so I got this Atari Jacquard power supply. So, hopefully that won’t jinx us. Okay, we are ready to do a test. I hooked it up to my TV here, let’s see - I am going to power it up and see what happens. That boots pretty quickly. So I am going to do the focus on this and set it to a distance I think would be useful.

See that wooden thing over there? That is my amazing “I” table. That is about 5 ft from the camera. I think that would be a good focal distance. I am going to adjust the lens until that is in focus. Then I am going to lock it down. Viewer quality doesn’t look quite so hot on this giant TV, but when it’s on a small LCD I think it will look just fine.”

“Ben: Okay, now it is time to hook up our LCD to our battery pack and see if they will all work together. And then also see how much power it takes. Alright - so as you can see, the screen here is wired in parallel with the camera. So, we are going to hook the positive voltage from the battery pack into our multi-meter, switch the multi-meter to display current, so we switch it over to the current input and switch this to amp, so we will see how much power it is taking. So, when you send amps or currents in a circuit you always want to wire in a line.

So, positive voltage goes through the multi-meter so it can see how much it is drawing, and then goes into the unit. So it is like this - jigajew jigajew jigajew. Your multi-meter is actually part of the circuit when you test that, and then we hook up ground. Let there be light. There we go. As you can see, there is the ceiling - it is showing up. And over here we are showing about 390 milli-amps. So that’s good. We have 21 milli-amp power battery, so in theory you should get what? 2100 divided by 400 is approximately 5 - I highly doubt you will get that much. You will get at least 3, guaranteed - depending on the charge of the battery.”

“Ben: Now let’s take a break from our Viewer Challenge and work on the X-Box 360 laptops some more. In today’s episode, we are going to be modifying the LCD screen so that we can put it into the laptop, as well as starting some of the other wiring.”

“Ben: Okay, now we are going to take apart the LCD monitor for use with the X-Box 360 laptop. Now, I like this model - it is getting kind of out-of-date, but I have used it quite a few times. It’s a Gateway 1775W. 17 inch wide-screen, it has a DVI input, which is more or less the same as HDMI - so we can hook it up digitally. The thing I really like about this screen is the resolution is exactly 1280 x 720. So it is exactly the 720 HD resolution. So when you hook the X-Box up to it, the pixels are kind of on a one-to-one ratio. The X-Box will work with a strange resolution, something like 1440 x 800 - it will work with that but there might be a little fuzziness to it.

So this one has a nice crisp picture. Okay, to take this apart, we are going to start by putting down a piece of foam. This is just some white foam I got from Hobby Lobby. We do this just to keep the screen safe. It is always good to be careful. Alright, once all the screws are removed we can continue to take it apart, and like so many things these days - it snaps apart and together. So, get a screwdriver and find a seam and twist it, see how it starts to open there? What do I care, I am not putting this back together again. Okay, so it looks like we have some screws on the sides here. There is a metal mount which holds the LCD in.

The metal mount is what is actually attached to the plastic case. It looks like there is another surprise for us here. See how the data cable goes through the shield. So we have to remove the shielding before we can pull out the screen completely. Okay, see this thing here? That is called a ZIF (zero insertion force) socket. It is important to undo this carefully, or you will ruin it. What you do is you take a flat-head screwdriver, twist up on one side, it flips up and you can pull the ribbon cable out. Okay, well here are the three parts of the LCD all together: power, driver, screen. In the next step we will modify these things so we can use it with our portable. Alright, so I am going to use a Dremel to knock down these tabs a little bit.

When we are soldering, there is less mass to pull through the circuit board - unless you have heat. Okay, here is the part that is going to make some of you cringe. A blow-torch like this is a lot cheaper than a hot-air station. So, you want to get right on it - get your pliers ready so when it comes loose you will be ready. Don’t get too close because you don’t want to destroy the traces. Come on, yeah - give it to me, baby! Yeah! Go for it, yeah! Swish - 3 points.”

“Ben: Okay, the driver board here - what we need to do is split this into 2 parts for our X-Box 360 laptop. Let’s take a look at this board here. Clearly you can see the white line up here, which shows the AC/DC separation. But, we also need to split off this. So, if you look right here you will see there is a big ground plane here and here. Then you have power coming from the DC over to the converter, so we should be able to cut it right through here. Okay, take a look - we’ve got a scrape here from the knife and then here I have Dremeled this corner and then we have the knife again. I didn’t Dremel the whole thing, because even I don’t care for that must dust inhalation.

So now, I am just going to bend it here. Did you hear that snap? And then, bend it down here. Keep your thumbs under it, so when it snaps it snaps right where the line is because you don’t want to crack or break the circuit board under the service components. Now that the circuit board is split we have to make sure we reconnect the ground connections as need be. There are quite a few of them, you can see three here, and then there are two here. Okay, I have the bulb inverter all set. It has a 12 volt line attached, it’s got the bulb enable attached, and it’s got the ground attached as we discussed. So, this is ready to go into the top of the LCD, so we are going to go on to installing the parts into the lid that we routed.”

“Ben: Now around the edges, there is a little bit of gap on the design. So, I am going to actually use some of this self-adhesive foam I got at Hobby Lobby - must buy all of it! It is great, you can use it for all sorts of stuff from padding, spacing. See how it fits in there nice and tight? Okay, let’s start putting parts in this board - you might remember the driver board and the socket. Get in there! Okay, so that’s hooked up. Now, we are going to insulate it against the metal here. I have this plastic that I pulled off of something, I don’t know what. But, I am going “green” and recycling it.

Okay, we have the driver board and the light board both wired up and they are wired to each other. The next step is to take this HDMI to DVI conversion cable and hook it up manually. There are four pair of twisted data cables, and each one has a colored wire and a white wire. There is red, green, blue and brown. So, we have to separate these into bundles so we can lay them down flat. Here is a close-up, I have taken the red, green and blue ones and put them on the left because most of the data goes right here. And the last one, the brown, is pulled out this way so it goes to the right. Also all these loose wires, these are like data hot plug connect, etc.

These all go to the right as well. Here is a close-up of one of the connections, we have got the white wire on the left, the colored wire in the middle, then the ground on the right. And you know, we wired this very carefully and it should work. Okay, now we have the funky foam all over the units, so when we put on the lid - the back of the lid will push against the LCD so the LCD will be tight in place.”

“Ben: Hey, this X-Box 360 laptop is actually starting to look like a laptop. In the next episode we will continue wiring it and we will be a lot closer to the finish. Now, let’s get back to the Viewer Challenge.”

“Ben: Brad, you’re not Jones. Where is Jones?”

“Brad: I don’t know some massive fall-off, I don’t know we won’t see him for a week.”

“Ben: Oh my gosh, it must be that evil reach game that came out.”

“Brad: That could be it.”

“Ben: If you have seen Jason Jones, please call our hotline below. You can help save his life. Alright, anyway I have all the parts we need to put together the portal shirt. A bunch of funky foam, which is great - beef jerky, lots of Velcro, and then over here I have got some screws, felt, straps. Okay, we have this pattern here which shows the largest oval we can fit onto the LCD. Alright, we cut the pattern and taped it to the LCD so it fits, right? So we can see how the oval is going to show through. So let’s put it where we want it and then we will tape this and hinge it, that way we can cut through the paper for the LCD. No when to say when.”

“Brad: Come down just a hair. That’s it, good right there.”

“Ben: Okay, that’s perfect?”

“Brad: I think that is good.”

“Ben: Alright, ta da.”

“Brad: An oval.”

“Ben: Now that’s how you make a pattern. Remember a sharp knife is a safe knife because if your knife is dull, you push unnecessarily hard and then it could slip and that is when you cut yourself. Alright, you need to put that Velcro around the oval on the inside. What’s wrong?”

“Brad: It’s not adhesive back - what are we going to do?”

“Ben: We need a glue gun. Portable work bench!”

“Brad: Okay, so what we have done is we have our strips of Velcro, we cut them into small pieces. And we used a hot-glue gun to glue them around the portal shirt.”

“Ben: Okay, you see the LCD here, the first thing we are going to do is add some funky foam to make all the thickness even. So it is basically a consistent depth. Okay, I have cut the portal’s pattern so I can match it back up to the LCD - so I know where the top of the LCD is at the top level. Oh hot-glue, you are my friend. I know sometimes I don’t treat you right, or remember your birthday but I do love you hot-glue. Okay, so now we are going to figure out how to hook up the straps. Don’t let go Brad. This is not nearly the most ridiculous thing I have ever worn.

Alright, so we will mark that spot. Just as I expected, we pretty much made a bra. Okay, so we have this plastic film that goes on the screen. We are going to put the Velcro on it, and you can see through the film so we can see our reference oval. So this Velcro will match up with what’s on the shirt and hopefully give us a nice, pure portal oval. All right, why don’t you fire it up - Ahhhhhhhhh! Hold the battery, okay you have the camera still? All right make a really small mark on the shirt.”

“Brad: Is the camera straight?”

“Ben: Yeah. Got it?”

“Brad: Got it. Here is the center of the shirt, so here is the target where the lens will be sitting.”

“Ben: So you are saying that we will attach the camera to the white undershirt and it will just stick through a hole in the back of the other shirt?”

“Brad: I think that will help hold the camera in place, and then protect the camera a little bit more.”

“Ben: So we need to get the camera lined up the right way so it matches up with the angle of the LCD up front. Well we have a spare pattern, so we will put that there. We will just cut off the bottom of it and line up the camera and the angle, and Bam!”

“Brad: So what do we do with the funky foam here, Benny? Isn’t that just to cover up the wiring and the camera, kind of?”

“Ben: Yeah, just to try and give it a little bit of structure. Also, sewing will hold it in place and this will just keep it as straight up and down as possible.”

“Brad: I got you.”

“Ben: I want to see how it works on the actual shirt. Oh, I’ve got a portal in me this big.”

“Brad: Hey, we got the project done. Will we still be able to return that shirt to Wal-Mart though?”

“Ben: Excuse me, I bought this shirt but there is a portal in it.”

“Wal-Mart Employee: Do you have the receipt?”

“Ben: That is all the time we have for today, be sure to tune in next time when we build a laptop you can actually comfortably use in the coach section of an airplane. I know, it sounds daunting, but we are going to try it and find the way. We will see you then.”

The Ben Heck Show was made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today, visit element14.com. Visit their community and The Ben Heck Show using the URL below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.

Tags: Design Resources, ben_heck

(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