Phase Four: Electronics

In case y'all didn't know, I'm a Mechanical Engineer, not an Electrical. Therefore my electrical knowledge is limited, and it took me two months to get around to wiring up the controls. But it's finally done, and here's the story:

I took apart a keyboard, and soldered short wires to the contacts on the tiny circuit board on a modern-day keyboard. Connecting these wires in various combinations creates the key signals we all know and love.

Here I attached longer wires to the two contacts on each switch [the groups of four switches being the four directions for each joystick].

Now I combine the long wires with the short wires such that I avoid awkward keys like the windows button and the function keys, while still making one of the joysticks correspond to the actual arrows, and making a button correspond to ENTER with another two as 'O' and 'K' since you have to type "ok" to make the emulator start, proving you aren't charging people money for downloaded games.

Look at me, it's almost like I know what I'm doing! Wow!

Chloe couldn't help but get in on the action, because electrical taping is one of her favorite pastimes.

Look at that sexy thing! Oh, and the control board is pretty cool too... [not quite all the buttons wired up, but fear not, they all are now]

The left side is gone because Paul is painting it, but it makes feeding wires through much easier! I now realize I have no decent picture of the controls themselves, I'll have to remedy that.

Looking through the absent left side. Starting from bottom: Spikes are from the casters I just added due to the fact that the thing is damn heavy. Black thing in bottom left is compressor from fridge. Silver tank is CO2, black box behind it is the woofer for the speaker system. Speaking of speakers, the knob in the top right is the volume control as well as aux in and out. The mess of wires you can see is clearly the mess of wires you've seen already. And the hoses carry the BEER! [At this moment, Yuengling]