Project: Alien Hospital

[_ferry_]

Swheeeeeeet

Here are the pictures i had made a few days ago:

It's like he's having 2 drooly looking eyes now hehe.

A mounting support for the monitor

Every gap was filled with some bondo, and sanded down afterwards.

And the edges were smoothened, no sharp edges anymore

makes me think of...

It must be a apple engineer who's stolen the design from my alien mod!

These are the parts i mentioned before. If anywone cares where they came from: I'm a service engineer for a company who produces climate and substrate computers/controllers for greenhouses. These are modules from such a computer..... 30 years ago.
I'll remove the mounted PCB's and add a microcontroller to switch the led's on and off. I could make those strips out of aluminium myself, but this saves a lot of time, is more detailed, including text, and has a lower price.

[kingstog]

Anyway, i've got a new update. I wasn't in the mood of the intensive work to create another instrument, so i started with modding the monitor.
The idea is, that once i have a little start i can think of some ideas to work out on it. Drawnings doesn't always give you all the ideas you could really use, while modding you create things and solutions you'd never thought about.

Yeah FREESTYLE modding
Just joined this post, lovin it. Great work coming from your mill, never seen ANYTHING like that tiny syringe. Looking forward to more! +REP

[tribaloverkill]

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiceeeeeeeeeeeee.

[_ferry_]

Yet another Sunday evening update:

I spend some time on the machine beneath the monitor. Offcourse it needed a case, so i started with that:

Nothing special, just a box with the same width as the monitor.

So let's build a arm which can hold up the monitor (+/- 5KG).

The block on the lower part will fit into a hole, so in fact the arm could even hold the monitor without any glue, because it hangs in this hole. I really need that, due to the weight of the monitor.

See I added another part next to it, looks better than just 1 sheet of plastic.

testfit, as you see it's possible to flip the monitor.

Between the 2 arms i added another reinforcement to prevent the monitor from swinging from left to right.

And 2 triangles on the inside so it won't hang over.

Back on the front, where these fronts will be mounted. As you can see i have a gap above it. Not an accident, I was thinking about filling that with iluminated acrylic. But later i decided it would be too fancy/useless. So it will be plastic. I need that space for mounting purposes anyway.

Testing the arm.

A tube for guiding the cables from case to tft (power, video, buttons, speakers etc. hope they'll fit )

Base painting the parts.

While drying i started with the buttons:

Imaging the time it takes to make this...

.... And double it, because i was not satisfied with the lower one, because it has some small misalignment.

I have 8 of these 7x5 dot matrix segments. They might be cool, but i think i can better save them for a usefull function on the real computer case, because this instument has a 12" TFT anyway. Don't know what to show on it either.

Found some cool connectors with locking ring as well.

Finally a picture of me while modding The reason for not seeing that to often is that my camera is quite heavy and i always forget taking pictures.

The cutout, together with acrylic for the buttons and the top of it.

The plan for the buttons:
- 4 acrylic touch-sensitive buttons.
- each one with a small logo showing the function of it.
- When switched on, a led slowly fades on and illuminates the logo.

Suggestions needed:

Beneath the button there must be a small antenna, I was thinking about adding meshX panel for that, and beneath that another sheet of acryl with led's as a way of "backlite". Not shure which led colors to use, any ideas? Generally I'll use green, so what about green backlite and a red logo when switched on?

Function of the buttons:
Power to tft
Power to PC
blinking led's on machine on/off ( for when the PC is on and i want to sleep....)
...... Free function...
Shall i use commonly used icon's for that? And what to do with the last button? I could use it as a Mute function for the speakers.

Note that the operation table/pc will have his own buttons (plenty of them ) for led's and fan's.

For those who don't understand the button's, this is the view from top to bottom:
acryl with logo - MeshX as antenna - acrylic backlite - paint to prevent seeing trough.

[D1337]

You know, now i just have to hate you...

Maybe its having a kickass monitor frame, realistic looking tools made from scrap, or just the fact you can use a dremel with one hand, a camera with another and still manage to get perfect edges and a nicely focused picture.

[tribaloverkill]

Insane man. Great job!

[_ferry_]

I couldn't sleep yesterday because my mind wasthinking thinking about the buttons. But i have a new and better idea for it:

Combining the buttons on the left with the dot-matrix on the right, with some darkened acrylic on top of it.

I'll have a 2 matrixes beyond each button, making it a 10x7 dots display, good enough to create the symbol and have some nice small animations. Like a powersymbol which rotates around his midpoint, a blink effectb when touching the button, different symbol when switched off etc.
I'll might need to use a microcontroller for each button, maybe for 2 buttons but whatever, they'd cost me €1,75.

[DaveW]

I remember when I was trying to develop buttons for the TIP-3000. I went through so many ideas, before giving up and buying off the shelf parts.

Hardest parts for me are designing buttons and making hinges. (for doors)

-Dave

[_ferry_]

So true, but i do't mather about the time it takes to build this case, so that's why 'm trying to build the things myself, and touch buttons are very attractive, especially combined with a led display in them

Well, i managed to start building the dot matrix circuit, existing of a pic 16f628 and a 4017 IC to select the row so that the pic can send his 7 bits . The circuit is almost done, next step is to build a simpel test program, see if i can use 2 buttons on 1 microcontroller etc.

[DaveW]

Well, i managed to start building the dot matrix circuit, existing of a pic 16f628 and a 4017 IC to select the row so that the pic can send his 7 bits . The circuit is almost done, next step is to build a simpel test program, see if i can use 2 buttons on 1 microcontroller etc.

Finally someone else who uses PIC microcontrollers! Yeah, PIC's have veriable I/O pins so you can theoretically get tons of buttons on a single 8 pin PIC.

Make me proud dude.

-Dave