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A project log for Matrix Operator's Console

kittankittan 04/13/2014 at 05:530 Comments

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.

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