Bunker Project Log

I’ve done it, two Cobalt Flux pads with 360 control boxes. It wasn’t cheap, but I’m a sucker for HD output (and Xbox Live Achievements, even though I totally suck at DDR).

In the end, all you really need is a soldering iron and solder, a screwdriver, a short length of Cat5 networking cable, a Male 9-pin D-sub connector (276-1537 at Radio Shack), and a MadCatz Beat Pad.

Here’s how it’s done:

Take out all of the external screws on the white plastic shell, and open it up. Try to disturb as little as possible as you do this.

The finished product:

I’ve been bitching about the cable bundle for a while now, and finally decided to post it up at avsforum.com?to see what the AV masters could come up with. One of the users over there, rgroves, suggested that I look at Checkers. So I did, and immediately requested a quote, mentioning the situation.

I got a call back within the hour, and I found myself ordering “The Fastlane“.

It was roughly an hour later that rgroves responded to my thread suggesting that I just build something rather that buy something that would “probably look hideous in your room”.

It was a month after Version 2.0 popped out of Mrs. G’s belly, and?ma and pa had come to do the things that grandparents do when their children have children. My dad and I were sitting on his truck’s trailer hitch, shooting the breeze. Him with his Busch Lite, me with a Diet A&W Root Beer. Then he looks at me quite seriously and says, “Y’know?son, If you ever need anything, you know you can call and we’ll come out and help.”

So I think about this for a second, and I say, “Y’know dad, there is something you can help me out with.”

I love audiobooks. I have a 30 minute commute, and road rage… or I had road rage until I discovered Audible!

Now, I actually look forward to traffic jams! My car has become a whole new venue of individual entertainment!

In fact, my company is moving offices so my commute is cut in half, and I’m worried that I won’t get my book time.

I used to take great pride in having built, and upgraded, and rebuilt, and maintained the Bunker machines.

However, I’ve got two kids now, and about 5.7 seconds each day to figure out why machine #3 bluescreens, restore the drive on #6, and calculate the price to performance ratio on this motherboard and that processor combo at Newegg.

So I gave up.

Dell has had 3 weeks of amazing deals on their barest of systems… the E521. Somehow I got to sniffing around and realizing, there’s no way I can compete.