Applying the sticky-back vinyl covering to the cabinet was very simple but time consuming process. We spray-painted the cabinet around all the edges just in case the particleboard was visible anywhere between the vinyl and the t-molding.

All we had to do was clean the surface, peel off part of the backing, and press it down onto the surface. We slowly peeled off the backing as we were applying more and more of the vinyl from one end of the surface to the other while being careful not to create any bubbles or creases.

After each piece was glued into place, we had to trim around the edges with a razor blade. You have to make sure that the vinyl is flush with the edge of the board. If there is any overhanging vinyl, it will be very obvious once the t-molding is put in place.

How Does it Look?

It looks very good. At this point I think it was well worth the time, effort, and money to go with the vinyl. It looks right and it feels like it belongs in an arcade.

Poor Planning

I didn’t order quite enough vinyl… I’m pretty sure I forgot that we had to vinyl both sides of the board on the outsides of the cabinet. My poor planning actually forced us to improve the looks of the cabinet quite a bit. We decided to cover the back wall of each control panel with a piece of blackened plexiglas. The plexiglas looks much, much better back there than the vinyl would. It has a lot more depth back there now; you can see the reflection of the buttons and joystick on the back wall now.

Alternatives to Vinyl

I really like the way the cabinet looks with the vinyl and I am glad we used it. We’ve been trying to think up a good alternative. The vinyl is expensive, partly because of the high shipping costs. The vinyl alone was probably almost 20% of the cost of the entire cabinet. Applying the vinyl to the cabinet was a pretty time-consuming process. I’m pretty sure it took us more than two full evenings to finish. That’s probably over 6 hours.

The best alternative we’ve come up with so far is melamine board from Home Depot.

We used two 4’x8’ sheets of 5/8” particleboard to build the cabinet at a cost of about $17 per sheet. It took about $90 worth of vinyl, including the cost of shipping, to cover the cabinet. If we wanted a white cabinet we could have saved about $50 and 6 hours.

Melamine is a plastic. I recently used vinyl dye to color my LCD monitor stand and laptop rack, and I would expect vinyl dye to cover melamine just as fully and easily as it covers PVC pipe.

Vinyl dye costs about $6 per can. I’m pretty certain we could dye an entire melamine cocktail cabinet with less than two cans of spray paint, and I am absolutely certain it would take way less than 6 hours.

I still have two or three blog entries to write to bring us to the end of the cocktail cabinet build but in reality we are actually just a few cosmetic tweaks and a bit of assembly away from a completed cabinet. We were playing some games on it and we learned that we made a terrible mistake in our choice of monitor.

The LCD panel we used really does have awesome viewing angles, unless you try to look at it from the bottom side. This seems to be the case on the handful of computer LCD monitors that I tested. I’m guessing that they sacrifice viewing angle on the bottom to provide a better viewing angle from above. That way when someone stands behind you at your desk they will still see a nice crisp image on your screen.

I’ve tested the two LCD televisions we have here, and they seem to have similar viewing angles from above or below. I assume the manufacturers know that televisions are much more likely to be hung at or above eye level.

I’d like to find an LCD TV that has both the correct viewing angle and would fit well in the cocktail cabinet. The table ended up being just barely big enough to fit our 24” LCD monitor, and this monitor has a very small bezel on all four sides. In fact, the bottom bezel on my 21.5” monitors that I have on my desk would make them too tall to fit.

For now we’re just going to live with the fact that our four-player table is effectively a three player table. We were originally thinking about putting players 3 and 4 side by side on one side of the cabinet, but we thought it would be a little too cramped that way. If we stuck with that layout, we wouldn’t have a problem.

My plan is to rotate the display 180 degrees in the xorg.conf so that we can play 1-player widescreen games from the player 3 position.

This may hobble my cocktail cabinet but at least it will work. If would have been much worse if we tried to use this monitor in an upright cabinet.

Update: Replacing the do-it-yourself stand

I upgraded to a pair of 27” QNIX 2560x1440 LCD panels, and they were just too big for my custom stand. I wanted to build another one, but I just have too many fun projects going on right now, and I didn’t think I’d find time to do it.

I ended up buying an inexpensive, heavy-duty monitor stand instead. Most of the options that were available when I built my own monitor stand quite a bit more expensive than the stand I ended up buying for my QNIX monitors.

This time I was able to buy a heavy-duty, fully articulated dual monitor arm for about as much as I spent on parts to build the last one. There’s not much point in going the DIY route anymore!

The Back Story

I started running my first dual head desktop at home with a pair of 19” CRT monitors sometime around 1999-2000. In 2001 I “upgraded” to a pair of 14” LCD panels. Ever since that upgrade, for almost 10 years now, I have been wanting to buy or build some sort of dual monitor stand.

I ran those 14” panels for quite a few years. Probably for a lot longer than I should have. Sometime in 2005 or 2006 I ditched my separate desktop and laptop and started using a laptop as my primary workstation. The laptop didn’t have dual video outputs, so I traded my dual head for the convenience of having my primary computer with me no matter where I went. It was a very worthwhile trade-off; I plan to never have a separate laptop and desktop again.

Update: Never say never. I ended up building a new desktop computer in July of 2013!

When I upgraded earlier this year, one of my requirements was that the new laptop needed to support a pair of external displays. The laptop I chose has an HDMI and VGA port. This laptop can only drive two ports at the same time, so I can’t cheat and use the internal display as a third head.

I don’t really consider the current monitor stand to be a finished product. It is in its second iteration now and could definitely be improved upon. I am going to describe where we started, how we got to the point we are at now, and probably talk about some of the things I might do differently next time.

Some of the Design Goals

There were a handful of features we thought were necessary:

• Adjust the angle of the monitors
• Move the monitors left and right, so we could get them to meet up nicely at the center
• The whole thing needed to be sturdy
• Less expensive than a monitor stand we could order

The Early Ideas and Failure

The original idea was to build almost the whole thing out of steel pipe from Lowes.

The two “FAIL” pictures show everything we had in our original design. We used pipe flanges, which are ridiculously expensive compared to the rest of the parts, to bolt the whole rig to the desk. Then we put a pipe flange at the end of each arm. Then we bolted a small 1”x6” piece of lumber to the flange at the end of each arm.

At this point we needed a way to mount the monitors on the lumber. We ended up bending some metal strips into J-shaped brackets so we could literally hang the monitors on the lumber.

We did a horrible job fabricating those brackets. The idea isn’t terrible. It allows for rotating the angle of the monitors on two different axes, and it allows for moving the monitors left and right. There were a few things we didn’t like, though:

• Our brackets were awful, they looked terrible, and we couldn’t manage to quite get the monitors to line up
• The two extra flanges probably cost more than all the pipe we bought

PVC to the Rescue!

We weren’t sure PVC would work out but it ended up having quite a few advantages. We ended up buying a 10’ stick of the higher pressure-rated ¾” pipe for just a few dollars. The tee and elbow fittings are also only 20-30 cents or so each.

They also sell really handy hooks that fit each size of PVC pipe. We screwed a pair of ¾” PVC hooks to each monitor using the VESA mounting holes; we just had to drill the holes out a bit bigger to fit the M4 screws. I only ended up using the top screw for each hook. I ran out of long M4 screws. They have been hanging for over six months without any issue, so I’m not going to worry about it now.

Each monitor has its own PVC rectangle with tee fittings on both inside corners instead of elbows. The top tube on each PVC rectangle is slid over existing steel pipe (where the upper flanges used to be). Then we connected the bottoms of the rectangles to each other with various PVC fittings and very short lengths of pipe.

The bottom of the rectangle is “connected” back to the vertical steel pipe with a short section of PVC pipe. It isn’t really connected; it just rests up against it to keep the bottom of the monitors from sagging. There is a pair of PVC screw caps in there so I can adjust the angle, but they weren’t at all necessary. If I did it again I would just put a single pipe in there without the fancy fittings.

Putting Some Lipstick on that Pig

I’ve been wanting to post pictures of this rig for months but it looked pretty bad in white. The problem was that to paint it I would have to take it down. If I took it down I wouldn’t have my monitor stand.

I finally took it all down this week to “paint” it. I bought a can of “vinyl dye” from the auto parts store. It worked very well, covers very easily, and looks infinitely better than the white PVC that announces what pressure it is rated for.

I didn’t paint any of the steel pipe. I like the way it looks just the way it is.

The Cost

I probably bought a total of about $60 or $70 worth of parts, but I’m pretty sure I really only used about $30 or $40 worth of them. The cost would go down a bit more if I used less steel.

I would prefer to use less steel. I’m not terribly happy with the way the steel joins up with the PVC. It works and looks alright. I just don’t like it.

What I Would Like to Do Differently

Right now the PVC is mostly a two-dimensional structure. I have some ideas for a sort of triangular PVC cage that would support the monitors both vertically and horizontally. Then that cage could just drop down over the top of a single steel pipe coming out of the desk.

What I have already does its job quite well. I wish I built something like this 10 years ago!

I have been using the btrfs-snap script for a few weeks and it is working very well except for one small problem. Btrfs seems to have trouble if you remove snapshots too quickly.

I made a few simple tweaks to btrfs-snap to help alleviate this problem. I added a check to make sure only one instance of the btrfs-snap script can be actively removing snapshots at a time. I also added a delay between snapshot removals.

This version of the script has been running on my laptop for the last few days, keeping a dozen snapshots at five-minute intervals without any problems. With the original script, btrfs-snap processes would start getting gummed up within the first few hours.

Update 2010-11-14:

I’ve been running this script for a little over two weeks now and I ran into my first runaway snapshot situation last night. Snapshot removal was hanging, and by the time I noticed it I had over 500 extra snapshots of each volume for a total of something over 1650 total snapshots on the file system.

After a reboot, snapshots could be removed again. Early on, the removals took over 30 seconds each, and disk I/O slowed to an absolute crawl. I don’t really want to be stuck with this many snapshots again…

I added a check to the btrfs-snap to make it skip snapshot creation if too many snapshots with the same prefix already exist.

Update 2010-11-29:

I seem to be getting gummed up more often lately, probably every few days. The file system isn’t getting clogged up with huge amounts of extra snapshots anymore, but by the time I notice things went wrong, my process table usually has a few thousand btrfs-snap processes sitting around.

They’re getting hung up trying to count snapshots. It seems that it isn’t possible to get an ls of the .snapshot directory while btrfs is in the middle of failing to remove a snapshot. I moved the check for the sentinel file up a bit so that it creates the lock before counting snapshots. I also added a little countdown loop so that it will give up if it can’t get the lock after a few tries.

We were thinking that routing the holes for the joysticks was going to be one of the hardest steps. It actually ended up being easier and faster than we ever expected.

We are using HAPP Competition Arcade Joystick. It looks like there are two common ways to mount these joysticks.

You can use a metal plate as your control panel and bolt them straight to it. We didn’t like this because we don’t want to see the bolts.

You can also use a thin wood control panel and screw it in from underneath. The joystick comes with a longer plastic spacer to help make up for the thickness of the wood. We wanted the joystick to be as tall as possible, and we didn’t think this seemed very sturdy.

How Did We Do it?

We routed a 2 9/16” square hole through our 5/8” thick particleboard control panels. Then we set the depth on the router so we could countersink the top lip on the joystick so it would be flush with top the of the particleboard. We got a nice snug fit on all four joysticks. Once they are pushed in, they are pretty tough to get back out. I am very happy with the results, since they might not even have to be screwed in.

Drilling the Hole in the Plexiglas

The hole for the joystick doesn’t have to be very big. The first hole we drilled, we used a 7/8” spade bit. We didn’t quite find center, and the joystick was rubbing in one direction. It was easy enough to clean that up, but we learned that it was better to just us a 1” bit instead. As long as the hole is completely covered by the joystick’s little plastic disk, it will be just fine.

What’s the Next Step?

Things are winding down fast now. Most of what we have left is just painting and decorating before we get to the wiring. The next step will likely be painting and applying the textured vinyl.

We were getting ready to start working on the arcade cabinet last when we realized that we didn’t have any of our bar clamps. John remembered that he lent them to our friend Joe the other day, so we took a walk over to Joe’s house.

When we got there he asked us if we had a few minutes because he wanted to show us what happened to him earlier. When we walked over to the car we noticed the small donut spare on the passenger side rear corner of the car. First he showed us some of the damage. The bumper cover had a split in it near the wheel well and every bit of plastic covering around the inside of the wheel well was torn up.

At first I was trying to figure out what sort of oddly shaped high curb he must have hit to manage to make that happen… Then he pulled the tire out of the trunk using the 5/8” wrench protruding from the tire as a handle!

We’re all very curious how it actually happened. We know he was driving at about 35 miles per hour on a straight stretch of road. I’m thinking the front tire may have driven over it and bounced it off the ground and that put it at the right angle that it could somehow puncture the tire. John thinks it may have somehow gotten kicked up over the tire and gotten wedged between the tire and the frame of the car then got forced in as the wheel turned.

Wrenches through tires seem to be a pretty rare occurrence. I only found one similar picture in a few quick Google image searches.

Cutting the slots for the t-molding went quite well. We just had to make a few test cuts with our slot cutting bit in a scrap piece of board to get the slot centered and then we were able to cut the slots on all the legs and arches very quickly.

The slotting for the control panels was a little more complicated and I have been worry about it a bit for the last few weeks. The problem we have is that the t-molding covers 5/8” and we need the molding to cover the 5/8” particleboard in addition to the 0.080” thick piece of plexiglas.

First we moved the slot for the control panels up 0.080”. The t-molding covers the plexigas perfectly at this height. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a 0.080” thick piece of visible particleboard below the t-molding…

We lowered our slot cutter to the very bottom of the wood and shaved off 0.080 inches creating a very thin notch. This is the cut that I have been worried about for a while. Surprisingly, we got a nice clean cut and the remaining particleboard on both sides of the slot seems more than sturdy enough to do its job.

We finished up our fourth, and longest, day of arcade cabinet construction. We also made significantly less progress than on any of our previous days. Plexiglas is a bit harder to work with than we expected…

We started with a single 36”x30” sheet of 0.080” plexiglas that had just a bit more material than we were going to need. It is the thinnest we could find at Lowes. If we could have found thinner it would have been easier to work with, even cheaper, and would have been just fine for our purposes.

Unfortunately, we cracked the first piece we tried to cut…

Cutting Out The Large Rectangles

I don’t think we’re going to crack any more pieces when we’re making the long straight cuts. We’re clamping the sheet of plexiglas between our workbench and a straight edge. Then we’re repeatedly scoring the plexiglas along the straight edge with a blade. It seems that the deeper we cut with the blade, the less likely we are to cause cracking. This seems very obvious in retrospect.

Rounding the Corners

We were able to rough-cut the curves on the corners by scoring the curve very deeply with a blade. We lined up the plexiglas to the control panel board and clamped them together. Then we just flipped it over so the plexiglas was on the bottom, and followed the curve with the blade.

Once the excess fell off we went around the edge with a belt sander. That made the edge nice and smooth and forced the plexiglas and particleboard into a matching curve. We learned that you have to keep moving the sander. If you stay in one place for too long, the plastic starts to melt.

We probably won’t sand like that again until all four pieces are cut and fixed into place. Then we’ll just go around the whole table and make everything smooth and flush.

Drilling the Holes for the Buttons

This part was pretty scary. Every time we drilled a hole we were worried we’d make a small hairline crack and ruin the whole control panel. We did some testing on our broken piece, so we did learn a bit before we drilled the real panel.

I made up a button template out of a thin piece of cardboard. It has a small hole at the center of each button. We used that to mark the button centers with a marker and we drilled small pilot holes at each point. Without the pilot holes it was difficult for us to keep the larger spade bit centered.

We used a 1 1/8” spade bit to drill the holes. I don’t know if this is the preferred method of putting holes in plexiglas, but it worked quite well as long as we were careful.

We kept the plexiglas clamped to the particleboard control panel but we did not drill all the way through the particleboard with the plexiglas still attached. It is important to clamp the pieces together pretty close to each hole that is drilled. Our test piece was clamped at both ends and it did a pretty good job of vibrating and flexing.

We also learned not to try to drill all the way through the plexiglas and particleboard at the same time. It was easier and safet for the plexiglas to finish the holes after the plexiglas was removed.

The trick seems to be going slow and straight. We only just barely drilled through the plexiglas. We didn’t even drill all the way through. Some of the little disks had to be popped out, and a few stuck to the drill bit.

A Small Change to the Design

We originally planned to have the plexiglas slot around the vertical pieces of particleboard that make up the legs. I don’t think we can cut quite that precisely…

We’re going to widen the slots the control panels fit into by 0.080 inches so we can fit the plexiglas underneath. It is much easier to cut particleboard and it should also do a good job of holding down the plexiglas.

Why Are We Still Using Plexiglas?

We test-painted a small piece of scrap and it looks VERY nice. The plan is to paint the underside of the plexiglas black. When you do this, the top side of the control panels will be very shiny and fairly mirror like. I think it is going to look good enough to be worth the effort.

What Comes Next

I’m a bit sad to say that we aren’t ready for the next step. We’re still in the middle of cutting the plexiglas for the control panels. There’s still three more panels to be cut and we still need to cut holes to mount the joysticks.

Update 2010-10-20:

We were able to cut and drill the plexiglas for the other three control panels in less than two hours. Applying a little more patience and using the correct tool helped a lot.

I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.04 on my Pavilion DV8T since it landed on my desk earlier this year. All the important things work, but there were two minor bits of missing functionality and one annoying bug:

• No working temperature sensors (the hard drive doesn’t count!)
• ACPI won’t report battery charge/discharge rate
• ALSA randomly stops making noise after a while

I’ve been running a 2.6.35 kernel ever since I started using btrfs as my root file system but it didn’t help with any of these three problems.

Some Improvements Since Upgrading to 2.6.36

I built myself a 2.6.36-rc5-git6 kernel a few days ago. I can now get a temperature readout from ACPI, but I think it is very inaccurate. I am seeing 134°F when the fan is off, and I’ve seen it read as high as 185°F under moderate load. The laptop never feels hot enough for me to believe either number.

I hope I’m not speaking too soon here, but my sound has been working perfectly for at least four days so far. I’m hoping that I will never have to run my ALSA unload/reload script again.

ACPI still doesn’t report the charge/discharge rate. This makes powertop a little less useful.

I’ve also noticed that powertop is showing that my wake-ups per second during idle are a bit lower. My usual “idle” workload when I’m on battery includes Chromium (with a few tabs open), claws-mail, emacs, and Pidgin sitting around doing nothing while I’m connected to Wi-Fi. With 2.6.35 it was rare to see anything less than 70 wake-ups per second. The last few days I’ve been seeing lots of mid 50s to low 60s with 2.6.36.

I haven’t been on battery enough to determine if there is any improvement in off-power runtime. So far, it looks like I’ll be getting the same 2.5 hours on battery as I always do.

I feel like we made huge progress in the couple hours we spent with the jigsaw on our second day working on the cabinet. It is really starting to take the shape of the finished product now!

Things are Starting to Take Shape

I may be biased but I think it is starting to look quite awesome. It actually looks quite a bit smaller than I expected. We have a full size top-down mock up drawn on the whiteboard and it looks ginormous up there.

All the material we removed with a jigsaw dropped the weight of the cabinet significantly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we removed more than one third of the material. The particleboard is pretty flexible and we’re getting a bit of wiggle up top where the controller boards slot in. We’re pretty sure it will all tighten up quite a bit once we drop the “floor” in and use some fasteners to tie the control panel boards together.

More Leg Room!

We cut nice big arches in the two long sides so that players three and four can stretch their legs. We were originally going to do the same for players one and two but the space between the sides of the cabinet just didn’t seem wide enough to fit two legs between.

We decided it would be better to just cut a smaller four-inch-high space so you can at least put one of your feet in a little closer. We think players one and two will likely end up sitting with one foot under the table and the other foot off to the side.

What’s Next?

The next step will be to drill holes for the buttons and cut holes for the joysticks. Our plan so far is to cover the control panels and the “cup holder” surfaces with a thin sheet of plexiglas (or some similar clear plastic). I figure we can paint and decorate the underside of the clear plastic and it should look like a nice clean, shiny, mostly black surface from the top.

If we do it right the blackened plexiglas should cover up all the seams where each of the four control panel boards meet up with each other.