Touch it!

No, that’s not the title for a new italian sitcom. I’ve chosen it because the day before yesterday I received my acrylic pucks and started to make a set of fiducials.

I bought these pucks here and here on ebay. The have a thickness of 8 mm and a diameter respectively a edge length of 60 mm. I’ve found no thicker option (for such a good price). They cost only 22,30 Euro for 10 round and 5 squared pucks including shipping.

After sticking the fiducial markers to the LED-cubes and a round puck with double-sided tape, I varnished them with “zapon varnish”, which is normally used to prevent metals from tarnishing.

The zapon varnish is clear and meant to function as a protective layer above the marker to prevent it from scrubbing. As you may see on the right, the paper gets a bit grey after varnishing, because it seems to absorb the moisture from the varnish.

After testing the varnish on the puck in the lower right corner, I had to go on on another 14 pucks. I hated it, because at best you varnish every puck two to four times.

A glossy picture of the fiducial family. One important thing in the end: the zapon varnish seems to be a bit impatient with the acrylic. As you may see on this picture (click to enlarge) nearly every puck has flaws on the edges. That doesn’t look very nice, but they will still do their job. My father told me that it could have something to do with the different surface tension of varnish and acrylic.

Because I want to occupy myself with “fiducials” (objects with appropriate markers on the bottom and eventually the sides) in the future, I was looking for a pretty solution and got inspired by Marcel Vincent and his table. He uses self-illuminated LED-cubes, which are driven by a few batteries. I ordered three of these cubes on ebay last week and upgraded them with fiducial markers today. Let’s have a look at the result:

The blank LED-cubes with the power-switch on the top.

The LED-cubes after their upgrade. There’s a marker on each side and a fifth on the bottom.

And this is the final result. Each cube is driven by three included button cells and there’s another pack of three extra button cells per cube included. Thanks again to Marcel for inspiring me with his cool idea.

As I had to do it as a demonstration for my diploma thesis anyway, I made a short movie of some applications running on my table. As already mentioned in the movie description: the table isn’t working very precise yet, so please consider that before hating on my baby!

P.S. Thanks to the great creators of all these wonderful applications, which made it possible, to demonstrate my table!

…is “Panora” from now on.

Since I didn’t want to hand out my diploma thesis without a name for my table, I spent a lot of time in the last two days looking for a suitable one and now I think, if found it. Hello Panora.

Are you? I am!

“What’s that?” “It’s blue light.” “What does it do?” “It turns blue.”

Up and running.

Finally I could move it to his designated place.

That’s looking good and feeling great! Thanks to everybody who made this possible!

Oh, and still remember this candidate? I fired him! No, not really, but fear next winter, dude! Har har!

The inside of my table is no secret so be my guest:

“Open Sesame!”

“Hey, come in!”

Multi-touch-table doesn’t mean, that you can touch this table on all sides! I gotta clean that!

Looks good so far. Only the VGA- and the RJ45-connector don’t cut a fine figure.

The table with the lid and the EndLighten removed. I tried to keep everything as dark as possible.

What a fresh looking cable tangle with many colorful vegetables!

That’s the work of many days.

The Fans and one speaker.

The projector in bat-style.

Welcome to the control center.

Card-reader and DVD-drive. I built it into a chassis I took out of a old PC-tower.

The  mounting for the projector. It’s more stable than it looks and it’s adjustable in height. (I’m feeling right now like showing my table at MTV cribs.)

Yes, it has W-LAN built-in.

The speaker is mounted with something we call “Lochband” in Germany. It’s very stable but still bendable and it has holes to screw it into something. It’s perfect for this and other cases as you may saw and will see on my other pictures.

A good wiring is very important. Therefore I used many cable ties in my table.

Maybe this is a better picture for showing it.

These 3 staves are meant to hold the mirror.

These mountings sit at the top of the staves. You have to pull them up a bit to get the mirror under them. The small hole above it is for a safety bolt.

These mountings on the bottom are also meant to fix the mirror. There are also 2 angles on the sides of the mirror, so he can’t move sideways. Maybe you can see them on one of the other pictures.

The power strip for powering the PC power supply unit, the speaker and the projector. The other end is wired to the contactor and terminal panel.

I also built out a chassis for HDDs from the already mentioned tower. Very practical to not throw your e-waste away!

I finished it yesterday and it’s the contactor and terminal panel. I did a exact sketch on graph paper and gave it to a friend of mine. He let the plate manufacture in the firm he’s working. Many thanks again to him and his firm at this point – it’s looking very nice! I sprayed it black and built in the parts I ordered some days ago at conrad.de and ebay.de. There was also some solder-work to do and now I’m a technical pro, yeah!

The front with USB (3x), VGA, RJ45, HDD-LED, audio, power-switch (PC), cable connector and power-switch (current).

The back – looks not as good as a industrial product but good enough for self-made.

The assembly of all parts, the testing and all that stuff extended over some days, let’s say even weeks and I didn’t photograph every single step, but you’ll see many pictures in a following post. Let’s start with some pictures of the first two or three days.

The first implementation were the fans…

…and the second the LEDs…

For the mainboard – the third implementation – I used some larger U-profiles as spacers and mountings.

I screwed them into the box for a first test.

Ok that should hold! (After that I painted the profiles black, but I’m keeping that picture because they’re looking so ugly. Later I bought a can of spraypaint for the rest of the parts.)

The beginning of the greatest pain in the ass – the wiring!

Hell yeah – 3 groups finished and only 39 more to go.

“Waiter? One cable tangle, please!”

“Oh sorry, I forgot – and another one for my wife, please!”

I really needed a break after that! (I did the wiring on two or three days.)

Three weeks later and I’m still alive. I was so busy with building my table that I didn’t feel like blogging in this time, but here are the updates. At first some pictures of the virgin box:

The side for the fans.

The side for the contactor and terminal panel and the holes for the air passage.

The lid, the doors and the castors got delivered some days later.

Since I decided to make a closed system I realized that there was missing something very important: W-LAN! So I first wanted to go with a W-LAN USB-stick but I thought it would be better to keep as many USB-ports as possible free to have the option to implement more cameras without using a hub. So I checked the reviews for PCI W-LAN cards on amazon.de and found the “TP-Link TL-WN651G” on the 1st place. Because it has some very good reviews I additionally ordered the “TP-Link TL-ANT2405C” W-LAN antenna.

Today the card and the antenna arrived. The implementation and the installation of the drivers took only a few moments and after several minutes the system was online.