Well, between this past weekend and today, the first of the preparations for my solid state DDR pad have begun to take place. I picked up a second soft pad (so I can strip out the contact panel and use it as a control interpreter), and I have picked up my order of polycarbonate sheet for the arrow panels. I don’t think I quite understood what people meant when they said that this Lexan stuff (and I have what used to be called Hyzod and is now Makrolon) was really, really tough. I figured this stuff would be bending all over the place, maybe shattering when someone really stomped down a foot, but now I don’t think so at all. And I’m starting to think that I should be making two single pads that can be joined into a double, rather than a full-on double pad, because this stuff is seriously heavy.
But it doesn’t bend. At all. I should take a picture of this stack of plastic I have sitting in my office right now. It’s pretty impressive. I mean, this is the kind of plastic they use to make security windows. As in bulletproof. I also understand now why it was so expensive, but I think we can consider that to be an acceptable price to pay when you realize that this stuff is never going to break. The contacts I’m going to tape to these panels will stop working LONG before this plastic is in any kind of bad shape - it’s that damn cool.
I’m going to start taking pictures of the process and posting them in my photo album (which I do have, but I won’t link to yet, for reasons of not having anything in it yet), so you can see the process. I’m working on getting a hold of the next major cost I will have, which is the 3/4 inch plywood and 26-gauge sheet metal (of two kinds and sizes). I’ve been told the sheet metal will not be cheap, and so I’m considering building only one half of the pad for now and working on the other half when I know what the heck I’m doing. This is, at the least, a somewhat large and very time-consuming project, and I want to have it done right. The worst part is that I’m already getting to a level where the soft pads I have are intefering with my game - I have passed my first six-footer yesterday, a fact of which I am enormously proud, and I’m earning A’s on more and more four-footer songs as I go along.
I asked Cheez for MAX2 for Christmas, so I’m hoping that he will be nice to me and grant my little Christmas wish so I have something new to stomp along to when this thing gets built. This thing is going to be the talk of the youth groups when it gets done - something I can’t wait to see. It’s kind of a bummer that I won’t get to stay around here, because I think it will be a nice bonding thing for myself and the groups to have made this panel and then goofed around on it so much (which I’m sure we will - the high schoolers loved DDR).
I’m also kind of waiting to see if I get anything from people for Christmas - as silly as that sounds - because I need a little extra cash to pull this off and make it right. I might be able to get the sheet metal donated or at least provided for relatively cheap, but the lumber is going to cost some bank (plywood and 2×4s), and the hardware to slap it all together is likely not going to be the cheapest thing, either.
Like I said, I will be taking extensive photographic evidence of this entire process, making sure that you all get to see the mass stupidity that will be my Dance Dance Revolution platform. WIth lights. And soldering work done by yours truly. And stainless steel.
Nice.