Matrix Operator's Console

04.14.2014 (Kittan)
Today I jacked with touchscreens all day. We set up a chalkboard (yes, a big flat stone you write on with a little round stone) to help organize ideas and divide up tasks, then I went back to touchscreens. I found enough parts to get six of them running on USB (previously I had 3 that were serial only). One of our screens is now parts from three or four different screens and a bit of custom circuitry - you can see the 5V buck circuit inline with the 12V power connector on it in the picture.

(technically not garbage, maybe worth a writeup of its own)

One screen had a shot inverter so I had to find a swap for that, and then cut up the housing and drill/tap/add some standoffs to mount it. Another guy, a little IBM something-or-other, I had to basically completely rebuild. It wasn't a touchscreen but it is now. Unfortunately the USB on the touch controller shot craps so it's serial only, which means I had to buy some USB-RS232 converters since the computer only has one COM. Also had some issues with two screens enumerating with the same device ID, so I couldn't run them both at the same time - probably doesn't matter since I know XP sucks at handling those problems and we're only testing with XP right now because it was already on the hard drive I stuffed in the machine. In any case, the serial converter takes the cost so far up to about $112 (priority shipping, you know; we got deadlines to meet).
(six fully functional touchscreens - three of them very custom, and one with backlight issues to be addressed tomorrow)

The next step is to strip down and, where necessary, re-jack the remaining 5 screens and get ready to start cutting out the custom housings. That should be pretty much done tomorrow.
I'm not sure what Novak's got going with code; we laid out some of the definition for the output of the city generator algorithm and I think he was working on creating and parsing sample files so we can start writing a basic rendering engine. The hardware should be done in a few days and then I'll get to sit down and write the city generator, which should be pretty ridiculous.

04.12.2014 (Kittan) Got the computer functional. We've got a vid card on order that'll handle screens 9-12 (so far the only out-of-pocket expense for the project) but I have a machine already running screens 1-8. 6 of them are touchscreens already hacked to work off 12VDC with the connectors we're going to use. I need to rebuild the other 6 - though really only 4 of them need, so I might leave it at that. Should be borrowing some tools tomorrow to make housing fabrication faster. By the end of the week we'll be welding a frame to mount everything on. Every screen is going to get a custom box built for it, with its own crappy paint job and, potentially, actual bulletholes and fungus, to make it look more like what's in the film.(note the server PSU providing 12VDC for everything)

The computer case was an old Gateway 2000 full tower I got off some guy for like $5 about six years ago. I think it came with a Pentium 2. The board in there now is an Intel LGA775 full-ATX board I bought last summer for a project that's since been retired; it has three long-slot PCIe and two PCI. Currently running a Core2Duo 2.13GHz, 1GB RAM. GPUs are ATI FirePro 2450 (purchased 2 years ago for a multiscreen workbench, which was recently upgraded to an EyeFinity 6 card instead), which support 4 monitors per card natively; I didn't have full-height brackets for any of them so I had to make some by cutting and drilling out some blanks.(Behold the Not-So-Greatway 2000)

The tower got a new paint job, a grey base with dusting of black and brown rattlecan to make it look crappy - glad to have a banana box full of spraypaint, mostly acquired for some movie props about three years ago. Had to do some cutwork as well, to mount up the power supply I wanted to use. The Intel board requires the 8-pin CPU power connector, which I'd already melted on that supply, so I sorta had to rebuild that too. Whoops.

04.11.2014 (Kittan)
I got a temporary workstation set up today and started tearing through screens. Everything will be running off a central 12V DC bus, so I had to either find screens that ran on 12VDC natively (which was, fortunately, fairly plentiful in my stash) or retrofit to work (only one required "the treatment"). Currently 12VDC is being provided by a Dell PE2950 server supply, which can push a little over 60A; I'm using an interface board Novak and I developed which breaks out the power to screw terminals and has a built-in 5VDC 2A buck supply. We'll probably use this in the final product, as it's also capable of turning on the server PSU from an external active-high signal so we can wire it off the computer's ATX, and all the LCDs will power on with the main machine. Should look pretty sweet. Tomorrow I'm gonna assemble the PC (we've only got 2 of the 3 necessary video cards so far though) and start stripping down screens for re-housing and rewiring power jacks.
Novak had a fairly entertaining couple of days, learning OpenGL basics so he can actually build the game side. It's interesting that we're doing a graphics-heavy software side since neither of us have ever programmed graphics before. But graphics is just the skin, the real fun is in the mechanics which should be fairly numerically intensive.

The last few months, I've been shifting away from making my living refurbing and reselling LCD monitors. That was my full-time job for about two years, mostly independently, so I amassed quite a pile of parts and junk. We've been needing to clean it out and get rid of most of this stuff. So yesterday and today I sorted through a lot of it, saved back some pieces to use for this console and junked the rest. Yesterday Novak and I hauled out probably slightly more than 1 ton of bare LCD panels. Today was mostly sorting and sweeping; the next haulout won't happen until I get this console completely enscreened so I know what parts I can get rid of. Then we'll just toss out everything left in one big load. The shop looks pretty darn great right now though. Tomorrow I'll organize the rest of the garbage, set up a table and start working on screens. Hopefully I'll have some pictures of what we'll be working with available soon.

4-8-2014: We discussed some design details, and came up with enough definition for the project that there is now more than we can probably get done is only a few weeks.  However, the basic functionality should not be terribly difficult.  First we need to get a machine up, probably running Debian, and then get all of the cards running under it.  Once that's done, one of us will move to the mechanical design, fixing remaining monitors and painting things to look good, and the other can begin on the software.