04.16.2014 (Kittan)
First coat of paint on the monitor housing faceplates. Novak and I took 'em out and shot 'em up with a .22 so they'll look all battle-hardened. Don't tell anyone, but first we tested penetration and shatter by shooting some plywood blanks in the shop with a saw running for background noise because I think it's illegal to discharge firearms in town.
Side panels for the housings were all cut and mostly snapped together; the compressor tripped out about five minutes before finishing and I just a bit ago got it working again so I have 2 housings not done painted yet. Tomorrow they'll all get finish paint, give the bullet holes some detail and then give everything a quick dusting to make them look crappy. Tomorrow night we should have all screens installed in fully painted housings and I'll start work on the frames.
We got the third 2450 in today and installed it alongside a wireless card since that was easier than running a jillion-foot ethernet cable. Debian installed, tomorrow Novak's gonna get xorg.conf figured out with 3 GPUs and 12 screens then start shifting over some of the code. By tomorrow or Friday we should be able to post some samples and have actual render output; by Friday I hope to have all screens mounted on the frame and basically be done with hardware then start helping out with the software.
Oh yeah and I also rebuilt an old external IDE CD drive (seriously, it came with a PCMCIA IDE card...), converted to USB and running off a single 12VDC bus common with the screens. That'll be the drive to Tank's left just kinda hanging out there. Also got arms mostly figured out, for the floating keyboard. This whole thing's getting pretty sexy. When did we start this thing? Friday? Not a bad week so far.