My DIY Projects

Basement – Corner Shelf

Last post I talked about putting in some flooring and shelving as part of revamping my basement space a bit. I ended up with a couple of issues after the initial work, one was sort of previously an issue, one new. The desks don’t quite fill the wall from my Photo Booth to the pillar halfway down the wall. This was, sort of an issue before. The secondary issue, I have this Raspberry Pi Rack that I previously had sitting on a shorter bookcase next to the desk. That bookcase has been relocated, and the new book cases reach the ceiling instead of, four feet or so up, so putting the rack on top is kind of out of the question.

Another potential issue with this space involves the cats. While they have not done it yet, it’s kind of the perfect sort of space for them to sneak in and start peeing on the floor.

Basically, it needed to be filled.

My original plan was to make a super basic little table that was the same height as the desk to fill in the hole. When I started planning it out, I realized that there wasn’t really any reason that the shelf could not be taller, so I opted to make it the same height as the new book cases.

There are some other challenged in designing this shelf. I didn’t want it to be deeper than the book shelves, at least not up top, but the end of the desk doesn’t reach the front of the book shelves. So the new unit would need to be slightly “L” shaped. Another problem was the power strip hanging off the end of the desk. While the basement has water issues in places (that I’ve been working to resolve), it’s never flooded anywhere near the desk and flooring area. I’ve still taken the precaution of making sure there isn’t anything electronic on the floor, so the power strip is strapped to the end of the desk.

Part of the purpose of the new unit was to also hide this wiring mess. But I still need it to be accessible. When the shelf was just going to be a short table, this was easy, make the top removable. Since I was making the shelf taller, I had to redesign things a bit so the middle shelf was removable instead.

After sketching out the general idea of what I was going for, I purchased some white pre-finished boards from Menards and set about cutting and assembling the new shelf unit. I used pre-finished boards so it would match the IKEA shelving.The base of the unit is pretty straight forward. It’s a square box. For the removable shelf, I built in a square of support blocks and cut a piece to fit. Since the unit sits flush against the one wall, I opted to leave the vertical gap on the right side open. This gives a place to reach in and pick up the removable shelf, plus a path to slip cables through for anything that’s temporarily plugged in. For the more permanent connections like Network cables going to the switch in the Pi rack, I later drilled a hole in the fixed back half of the middle shelf.

For the more permanent connections like Network cables going to the switch in the Pi rack, I later drilled a hole in the fixed back half of the middle shelf. The back half being fixed in place also means that I don’t have to completely remove the Pi Rack and Alexa anytime I want to open up and get to the Power strip.

After adding a stained piece of backing to the shelf, I went up and drilled some shallow holes to add shelving. I ended up liking these small shelves much more than I expected honestly. I can put some of my tech stuff on one for easier access and I really like the additional mini display areas for some of my more favored figures.

After putting the shelf in I found I needed to make a few last bit touch ups. Firstly the front was more exposed than expected, so I added a vertical board to fill in the space. I also need to get some white paint to touch up the tops of the front vertical pieces.

Overall though I am really happy with the result.

Basement – Sliding Door Project

So, I’ve been doing a fair number of projects, but writing about them isn’t one of those projects. Some of it has been improving the basement a bit. Part of the slowness of the basement work is because it occasionally floods a bit. Not really “standing in water” flooding, but “there is a puddle that keeps coming” flooding.

It’s annoying, but I’ve been working to fix it. The house originally didn’t have any downspouts on the gutters, I added those. I’ve added extensions to the gutters to direct water away. I added a new downspout near the area where the water seems to come from to help direct it away more. I cut out some drywall in the underside storage area and pulled the bottom step off of the stairs to fill in some ugly crack-ish spots in the area where the water comes from. At this point, I am waiting for more heavy rain to see if some of this has made any real difference. So far the cement fill seems to have done the best. It’s tricky to describe but basically, the water still came in, but it came in waaaay less and in a slightly different place. So I’m getting there.

I’m not really here to discuss the flooding though. It has affected some decisions on how to make the basement nicer, like I am not going to add Drywall walls like I wanted to. And no carpet, though that was out anyway, because the cats are assholes (We also replaced all of the upstairs carpet with vinyl plank flooring).

One fairly simple project was adding a door. In this case, I put in a sliding barn door style door. My wife wanted to put in a real door but I wasn’t keen on that since there isn’t really a good place for it to open to. The door itself had a couple of motivations behind it.

One, the basement is divided into two halves. One half is semi finished and “nicer” and it’s where I keep my computer and collection of stuff and there is a TV and couch with game consoles and my son has a corner that is his bedroom area when he is around. The other half is under the “original house”, it’s rough, the ceilings are a little low, and there is more duct work and such hanging from the ceiling. We use it for storing all sorts of stuff. It’s really great for that.

The “underside” half is ugly though. I wanted the door to be able to block it out, mostly for aesthetic reasons.

The other purpose of the door is to be able to lock the cats in the basement when we have guests over. My parents and my wife’s parents are all allergic to the cats. We lock some of them in bedrooms, we also lock some of them in the small sunroom/office area upstairs. Sometimes we would lock them in the basement by blocking the stairs with a giant cork board we have that doesn’t really have a home.

Now, we can use the door. It slides between the two openings, stairs and underside storage to block off either one.

One concern was air flow from the storage area, so the door can also be positioned in the middle, which is where it usually sits, so air can flow in and out both sides. It also lifts off easily if I needed to remove it.

The door itself isn’t anything complicated. I could have built a door but I opted to just buy one, though the door was pretty pricey since it needed to be extra wide. The roller kit is a low profile barn door kit, easy enough to install and it nestles up into the floor joist ceiling. The tricky part was that the floor joist didn’t reach the edge of the opening, so I had to screw a couple of 2×4 stand offs to the floor joist to get the door to sit int he proper place. This also meant adding some 2×4 lifts under the stand off to support the immense weight of the door.

I also ended up with an issue of the door rolling slightly. I am not sure if it’s the house or if the rail is a little off (probably a little of both) but the door slides towards the stairs on it’s own. Not very quickly, but it does move.

I solved this with magnets, at the suggestion of my uncle. I didn’t really want an ugly latch that would also potentially end up in the way of the door sliding or people walking. I bought some block magnets and some double sided Gorilla tape (I originally used Command Strips but they were too weak). I stuck a larger magnet to the wall, then two smaller magnets on one end and the center of the door. This allows the door to hold it’s position when blocking the stairs or when positioned halfway.

This project isn’t quite done. I may also add an L bracket of some kind in the center of the door, to hold the door from being leaned outwards, and I want to add a roller on the backside to the whole action is smoother. the way things are, if the cats get determined, they can push the door enough to get it to release from the magnet and escape from the basement.

I also need to adjust that network cable because it’s kind of just there and ugly.

My DIY Dance Dance Revolution Hardpad

IMGP0429Something like ten years or so ago, I built my own hardpad for use on Dance Dance Revolution and Stepmania.  Most of the pads that are easily bought are “soft pads”.  These vary in quality, I have a couple of pads that are pretty light weight and plastic I used ages ago.  These pads tend to get damaged pretty easily, especially when wearing shoes, and slide all over the place when playing.  When i used mine in college I actually taped it to the underside of the rug in the dorm and taped out the grid of squares on the surface, so I could play using my shoes.  I’m sure the people living below me loooove that.  Probably as much as I loved the people above me who played dice constantly.   Some more pricey are made of a thicker though still pliable rubbery material.  These mats slide around less due to the grippy nature of the material, but they can get worn out and damaged by the rough beating of shoes.

The ideal pad is a hard pad.  These can run hundreds of dollars on-line.  They also tend to be large and bulky and heavy.  Shortly after i had finished in college I decided to employ me newly acquired Engineering design skills to build my own Hard Pad.  The electronics part was easy.  I went to the local used game store and asked for the cheapest used PS2 controller they had in stock.  The guy behind the counter actually asked if I was planning to build a DDR pad with it, which was funny since I was.

The pad itself was a bit trickier.  I’d studied several design ideas on-line that others has built.  I wanted something that was less bulky than most of the pads I’d seen.  I also wanted to keep costs down somewhat, which meant using a little material as I could and not having to invest in a bunch of expensive triggers to wire into everything.  The trigger is the key component of course, since it registers the steps when playing.  The dead squares are all just plywood covered in sheet metal.

The sheet metal is also what I ended up using to build the triggers for the step squares.  When you press a key on a video game controller, all that happens is that an electrically conductive pad is flattened and shorts the connection between two copper pads on a PCB board.  When the electrical short is made,  current can flow which causes some chip somewhere to register the button press.  For my step pads, I simply enlarged this process by attaching plates of sheet metal tot he base and to the bottom of each step pad.  To give the pads some cushion and bounce, I placed strips of weather stripping bought at the hardware store between the base and the pad.  Stepping on the pad creates more than enough weight to overpower the weather stripping causing the two sheet metal pads to connect and trigger, stepping off allows the weather stripping to flex back up pushing the pad back to a neutral, unconnected position. I took some CAT 5 cable and soldered it to the sheet metal contacts and the appropriate parts inside the PS2 controller to replicate the button press action inside the controller.

Everything else was cutting wood, attaching corner brackets and attaching sheet metal.   Here are some old photos of the process.

The general construction was sound, but it had a few issues that I never really got around to fixing until more recently.

In the original design, I soldered the connections for the step pads tot he controller’s D-pad.  Mostly because the solder points were larger and easier to solder to.  This had some unintended side effects that made the game unplayable at any higher difficulty level.  By design, the controller never expects opposite D-Pad buttons to be depressed at the same time.  That is, it doesn’t expect the player to press left and right at once, the D-Pad generally controls movement in most games, why would you need to press opposite ways at once.  Dance Dance Revolution has “jumps” in more difficult stages, these are sequences where two arrows have to be matched at the same time, as in “jumped on”.  Since the D-pad doesn’t register left+right or up+down, these jumps would never register and were always considered a miss.  Kind of game play breaking in the case of DDR.

I also wanted to add a box to the set up, to replicate the buttons on the front of a real DDR machine used to select songs and options.  Not something important, but it would add to the effect, and if I ever got really ambitious, I could build a whole cabinet someday.

The other major issue, when I built the original design, I didn’t really do any real management of the wires between the controller and the pad.  They kind of strung around on the sides, they were all too long, and the controller itself was permanently attached to the pad, making moving and storing tricky.  I wanted to make the controller bits, detachable.

I’ve since solved all of these problems with some improvements, all somewhat related.  First problem was the triggers not working for jumps.  This was simple but tedious.  I needed to reqire the buttons from the D-Pad to the face buttons (Triangle, Circle, Square, X).  These work just fine when pressed together, lots of games have combinations where you have to press several buttons at once.

Please Parton my Shoddy Soldering

During this process, I also pitched the controller shaped housing and stuffed everything in a generic electrical project box.  I soldered the 4 shoulder buttons to 4 buttons attached to the box lid, to be used to interfacing with the menus.  Problem 2 solved, everything is in a nice box.

IMGP0430

The last bit was to make the controller easily detachable.  There are 4 pads, each with 2 wires, for a total of 8 wires going from the controller to the pad itself.  I was already using CAT-5 cable for the wire, it had 8 wires in it, so I attached an CAT5 end on the controller piece and a CAT5 receptacle to the dance pad.  Now the two were easily separable and securely attachable.

The ultimate test of course, does it all work?

stepmaniaresults

I’ve run several sets of tracks using the new set up and it certainly does work.  My DDR skill needs a lot of improvement to get back up where it was at my peak, but the pad itself works just fine.  Which is sort of the point, because it really is a fun way to get a pretty good workout in a short period of time.