Wiring Up To The Raspberry Pi
Before wiring up to the Raspberry Pi, you should first make sure it is installed with a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS.
We will properly set up the Raspberry Pi software later, but for now we want to get everything wired correctly. This process is a whole lot easier if we can fix the Raspberry Pi to one area of the wooden box. It doesn't need to be fixed, but if you want things looking a bit cleaner you can get a small Raspberry Pi enclosure and glue the bottom of it to the bottom of the wooden box, and then screw the Raspberry Pi into the bottom of this case (importantly leaving the GPIO pins and other connections accessible).
Our end goal is to as neatly as possible, wire all of the buttons up to the Raspberry Pi, like this:
Admittedly this isn't too neat, but I don't particularly care for my own build. You can tidy it up when doing yours if you want! As a side note, don't worry about the WIFI dongle in this picture, my Raspberry Pi WIFI chip is just broken and I didn't want to buy a new one.
At this point we have all of the buttons prepared with the correct wires coming out, we will want to wire up the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi. In the image above you can see I have used breadboard wires to extend the length of the wire from the buttons to actually reach the Raspberry Pi, you may need to do this as-well.
You will want to connect the buttons and ground wires to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins as follows
Make sure before you start wiring you know which orientation the pins are in, to avoid painfully rewiring them later! Another tip (from experience) is to wire the back row of GPIO pins first (so on the diagram the right side) so that you can actually access the front set of pins instead of fighting through a growing tangly mess of wires.
If you're really struggling to wire everything up even with the breadboard pins, maybe consider looking into some spade connectors. These make joining wires a breeze and you don't even need a crimp tool, you can just grab some pliers and squash the wires into them to connect them
As stated before, I'm not really an electronics expert, this is just my account of how I've bodged everything together so that it vaguely works. I'm sure there are loads of other resources online that are better places at wiring advice than me! As long in the end you have wired the respective buttons and switches up to the corresponding GPIO pin layout above, this should hopefully work.
Side Note: If you're good with electronics, please give me some advice on improving this section!