Arcade game panel meter by Strahany

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a mounting block for a volt/current meter for my video arcade machine. Video arcade machines generally have a power supply that provides +12 volts, + 5 volts, -5 volts, Ground... etc... The most important voltage of all is the +5 volts as this is responsible for all the logic components on the main CPU board, some game boards can be very fussy about the accuracy of this voltage and when changing main boards in a cabinet you sometimes have to recalibrate your +5 volt rail if a particular board draws significantly more or less current than the last one you took out. This also depends on the quality of the power supply as to weather it will fluctuate from board to board. Anyway I was sick of having to pull out the multi-meter every time I wanted to change boards so I decided to mount a dedicated volt meter to the power supply so I could easily check and adjust my voltage whenever changing boards. I searched Ebay for a meter and found a cheap panel meter that does both voltage and current for around AU$3.50 so thought this would be great as I can also see the different current loads of different boards. I have knocked this design up on Tinkercad and it's pretty basic but should do the job nicely as I wanted all the wires tucked away and out of harms way (don't want to blow up my power supply or expensive game boards due to stray leads touching the chassis etc...) I found that the current reading on this meter to be a bit low and re calibrated it to match my multi-meter, but the voltage reading came up spot on.
Anyway this is still work in progress and I will update shortly with the end results.
This is my first design upload to Thingiverse so enjoy and any feedback would be greatly appreciated and welcome.
(I will include a wiring schematic with the update)
Update 7th September 2017:
I have uploaded a wiring diagram.
Also I am in the process of doing some changes to the design that will include spots for terminal blocks etc... to make connecting up the meter easier and take up minimal space so stay tuned.
UPDATE 18th September 2017:
I have decided to completely re-design this mounting box (Smooth corners, mounting holes for BUSS bars etc...) so I am going to abandon this project and upload a new one shortly but I will leave this one up for anybody who needs a basic meter box or would like to remix it. Thanks for looking and look out for the new one.