My DIY Projects

My DIY Projects The Basement

Basement – Sliding Door Project

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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 Projects The Basement

On Moving and a lot of Small Projects

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Moving into a new house tends to create a lot of little projects.  There’s been a few extra in the case of my new home, since it didn’t have any appliances, and was missing quire a few of the small trimmings.  Things like, handles on the kitchen cabinets.  It’s an easy little thing to add, a few measurements and a bit of drilling is all, but it needed done.

There’s also been quite a few larger projects.  Like the appliances.  The fridge and stove pretty much go right in and plug in, though the fridge needed a water line run to it to work the ice maker.  Then there’s the dishwasher, which needed to be hooked up to power, and needed both a water and drain line run to it.  These aren’t that bad either, punch a hole through a cabinet, drop the lines, tap into the existing sink plumbing.  This whole project also involved adding a garbage disposal to the sink however, which itself required the addition of a switch the run the thing.

Little projects.  Like hanging curtain rods on all of the windows.

Or putting in some railing on the front and back stairs, which was something required by insurance.

This is of course a little more involved, what with needed to drill into concrete and cut the railing to fit and whatnot.  Then there’s things like hanging decorations and some display racks in my wife’s office.  Or assembling shelving in the basement for my junk, which resulted in a trip to the ER when I dropped one unit on my foot while trying to tip it up, and failing to do so.

There was also the dilemma of the washer an dryer.  The closet for the laundry appliances was very small, so we had to get some smaller appliances.  The Washer hooked up easily enough, it just hooks to the hot and cold and existing drain.  The dryer was something else completely.  There wasn’t a dryer vent hole, and with the cramped space, there wasn’t a lot of room to add one.  I managed to chop a hole in the wall and go down through the floor tot he open basement, where I added a bit of duct work to go out the side of the house through an existing unused hole where a vent used to exist.

Then there were the issues.  Early on we discovered that the plumbing wasn’t draining properly.  A call to the plumber and we found that the sewer line was blocked, and after an expensive call and some digging, the sewer was fixed.  More recently there was a power issue in the basement area.  I did a bit of checking on all of the junction boxes but ultimately had to get an electrician in.  He tightened a lot fo connections in the breaker box and found a bad wire on the problem circuit.

Speaking of the basement, things are coming along well there as well.  Just before the power issue I was in the process of adding some outlets for the TV and video game corner.  Which will be pretty cool when done.

My DIY Projects

My DIY Dance Dance Revolution Hardpad

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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.

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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.

 

 

My DIY Projects

Weekend Project – Picket Fence Shelf

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Just wanted to show off a little recently completed wood project.  My brother ended up with a huge pile of extra fence pickets and I put some of them to good use making some shelf units for my daughter.

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The process was pretty straight forward, each shelf consists of 11 pickets and 3-4 30″ boards.  The board length is variable of course which may alter the number of pickets needed.

First, I did a rough sand job of each picket, rough because I wanted to remove the worst of the rough bits but leave some of the overall “rustic” roughness of the surface.  The pickets were also trimmed off by 1″ incrementing lengths (1″, 2″, 3″, etc) so they would stair step across the back.  The boards for the shelves were also cut from an 8 foot 1×10″ board.

At this point, everything was painted with several coats of white paint.

Assembly is a bit tricky but by the third shelf I had a pretty good method down.  The side pieces get marked for where the shelves should fall (variable intervals depending on needs).  Then the side shelves are screwed onto the ends of each shelf in the appropriate places (I just screwed right through into the ends of the shelves, careful not to split things).  Two screws each picket, each shelf point.

Then I measured out from the edges on the backside to line up the longest center picket in the middle, this is then screwed down with a 1/4″ off set from the bottom from the sides.  This will leave a small gap along the bottom along the back.  The purpose is to make the unit more stable so it will only hit the floor on the side pickets.  Getting 4 side pieces to sit flat as legs is a lot easier than getting 11 pickets to line up flat on the ground (which would cause the shelf to wobble).

Next the two shortest back pickets are attached along the edges of the back.  The remaining pickets get attached last and I found it was easy enough to just eyeball the spacing.

I also added some simple boxes to the bases of two of the shelves to give some added height (as pictured above).  This part is optional.

My DIY Projects

Building a Better Dance Pad

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So a while ago, I designed and built my own Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad.  I’m not going to go too much into the details behind that, but for a variety of reasons, I’ve actually used it considerably less than I’d hoped.  I also found recently that the arrows don’t detect properly anymore since they are connected to the Directional Pad which reads as analogue not digital.

So, I fixed it.  While I was fixing it, I finally added the button box I’d been meaning to add.

IMGP5404

The button presses of a Playstation Controller are simply the creation of an electrical contact.  This can be replicated on any similar button by soldering wires to either side of the PVC board’s pads inside the controller.

Anyway,  the first task was to rewire the pad’s “buttons” to the shoulder buttons of the controller board.  Simple enough.  Now they show up as “buttons” and not analog pulls in the PC.

Step two was to make the box removable from the pad for easy storage.  This also allowed me to replace the ball of wire that I’d ended up with when building it the first time.

IMGP5406 This mess becomes a network cable and a network jack.IMGP5405 The network cable is the one used for the new connections tot he shoulder buttons.

Next is the box, which I wired to the four face buttons of the controller.  It really doesn’t matter if I use the “start” and “select” buttons since in the end, the Playstation shell is tossed out and I simply map the buttons to whatever I want in game (I have yet to see how this will affect it if i use it on the Playstation).

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The end result is much cleaner and much more reliable all around.  I will probably add some stickers or something to the box to make it look prettier.

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