Aurora Chair Concept post

So I have a brand new project to begin! All I have to do is paint the arcade box.. Im getting there...

This one im pretty excited about. Blatantly ripping off the idea here ive decided to make my own racing/simulation cockpit. Its a Ottoman, which has a hollow storage area in the middle. When you lift the top off, it has a fold-up seat, and contains a G27 steering wheel, with pedals bolted down and a steering wheel frame. You sit inside it to play games, and pack it up neatly into a functional couch.

I was going to just build a frame, but a cockpit of sorts you could actually sit inside of sounded great. I, however, dont really need a couch, but i do need a new coffee table. When not in use, a top can be placed on it to create a coffe table. When in use, the lid comes out, the steering wheel is mounted on top of it, and its Gran Turismo 5 time.

This also couples with my Freespace cockpit project - a cockpit with switches/buttons/whatnot. It works like any keyboard, so its compatiable with anything that can accept a USB keyboard and bind buttons. So instead of fumbling with buttons to play the game, id be using switches/levers/etc to kill Shivans. Sick of trying to target a particular ship, and going past it, and having to go through all the ships again because you never bothered to bind 'previous ship' or cant be bothered typing 'Ctrl-Alt-Mac Key-Commodore Key-F' to fire primary lasers? This will be for you!


Features include:

• Coffee Table
• Racing wheel for GT5
• Pedals reverse-mounted like a real car (push away, not push down like what comes with the plastic wheels you buy)
• Subwoofer/Speakers
• Bass Shakers (for force feedback for explosions/car engine/whatnot)
• Swappable Steering wheel/Freespace cockpit
• Custom built sequential/reverse shifter with a nice heavy feel (those plastic shifts dont do the wheels justice)
  

Crosssection of the box, with the right wall hidden for comparison


Closed up, a coffee table.



Seated view with the Racing wheel and custom sequential shifter to the left


Custom build freespace cockpit

DIY Bass shakers (Tactile Transducers)

Ive been fooling around with Tactile Transducers for the Aurora Chair project (upcoming). These little guys are like Subwoofers, but the produce more vibration than sound. This makes them great as force feedback, a fact I will be incorporating into the Aurora Chair project.

Below is a little DIY vid I did up for them, showing how to build a homebrew one. Unfortuantly, I turned up the vol and bass to max for the test showin in this and explordered the amp circuit, so im currently looking for some salvage.

Clap control for Music PC

When I set up my FreeNAS server, I lost only one program I actually missed: iTunes. Now dont get me wrong, I absolutely hate iTunes as its a restrictive, bloated, and useless peice of crap. However, the Remote app on my iPhone is fucking fantastic and even after trying out alternatives (Namely songbird), the remote control apps just dont cut it.

So ive resurrected my old Compaq (for the 4th or 5th time now), and installed my nLite XP SP3 disc.

Ive installed iTunes 10 on it from a archive site as the lates iTunes refuses to work properly (the remote app wont connect period) but the 10.0 release worked fine. I imported a directory from my NAS into the setup and got it working well with the Remote app. After connecting this setup to the external speakers i set up for my TV, i was able to play some music just fine in the TV area.

However, iTunes doesnt really auto-add new tracks in the folder like i want it to so i bought iTunes folder watch from here. Its a really great app if your going to suck it up and use iTunes. The registered program sits in the background, scans your watch folder and auto-imports the tracks into the iTunes db. Its got quite a few more featuers as well.

However, one thing i was a bit 'meh' about was getting home after a stressful day at work and fiddling around on my iPhone to get it to play music. As it had a internal mic i thought i might be able to work something out.

I then settled on working on being able to play/pause via a clap (i have done voice recoginition programs a long time ago but found them to be fucking frustating when they pick up your voice during conversations). I found a nice and simple freeware program (here) that detected clapping and would run your selected program/action/whatnot.

After a short fiddle around with that awesome program autohotkey, i had 2 .exe files to control iTunes - one for play/pause, one for next song.

All it took was to set up the clap program to run the .exe's upon clap detection and presto! I did rip the microphone and super-glue it facing outward on the exterior of the laptop shell (this compaq is literally falling apart, so it wasnt really a issue)
Now i can walk into the lounge and clap once to start playing music immediately.

The Project again, roadblock gone!

Finally, more work on the project.

Problem:

VGA-CAT5 adaptor works (discussed here), but now the monitor cannot detect that its plugged in. So whats been happening is that every time it changes resolution (pretty much start and end of any game) it pops up that annoying 'ANALOGE MODE' box in the upper left of screen for 10 seconds. Also, when the computers plugged in to power it displays the 'NO CONNECTION DETECTED' box that slides around the screen.
Massively annoying, as its a issue thats only cropped up.

Its taken me over a month to figure out how to fix it easily. Simple answer is splice a VGA cable, but damn I bet that would only cause problems down the track.

Reasoning

I figured that since CAT-5 cable has 8 cables, and VGA has 15 pins, obviously some pins arnt being connected. I also assumed that, since monitors don't display all the crap the moment there plugged into a PC even if its not powered on, it must be something hardwired into the plugs on the computer end that allows the monitor to detect its plugged in even if there's no power on in the PC.
It makes sence that it will run a lower power signal through one pin, and look for a reply down another ground line. But with 15 pins, what combination is correct???

Solution
http://www.monitorworld.com/faq_pages/q17_page.html. This is what got me started on the right track. I noticed on this some 'sense' pins and ground pins - this narrowed it down for me from something like 210 different combination's to try to 9 or so.
I hit on the right one on the second go - shorting pings 10 and 5 made the monitor turn blank ready for input like it used to.
From there it was a simple case of cracking open the cheap CAT-5 -> VGA adaptor and soldering a wire directly across pins 5 & 10. Put back together and re-insert. It was so simple! (Not!)


Creating a short that tricks the monitor into permanently realizing its connected on the analogue mode. Once the shell is fitted back on, its as if i hadnt modded it!