About 7 years ago I built a full size arcade cabinet out of wood. It took over a month but it was a really neat project and I learned a lot while doing it. The arcade cabinet is a lot of fun but it is also also quite large and I no longer wanted to dedicate the floor space for it. At the same time I didn't want to give up the ability to play the arcade games using a classic joystick and buttons.
On 10/21/2014 I decided to create a miniature arcade cabinet. I own a 40W FS Laser cutter and I love working with interesting woods and acrylics. I was hoping that I could find some good plans online for a cabinet and this project would give me the opportunity to play around with a Raspberry PI that I received for last Christmas. After searching online for quite a bit I discovered that there were no such good plans that were available. There were projects that had made available some great documentation but in terms of getting plans to be used as a starting point I couldn't find anything.
I spent almost 4 weeks finishing this project. I drew the plans from scratch using my old drawings for the full sized arcade machine as a reference. I cut all of the pieces in trial runs using super cheap 3/16" foam poster board and then the final pieces using a mixture of 1/4" and 1/8" acrylic. The design plans for the project took roughly 20 hours. I spent an hour each morning over coffee working on the design for about a week and then some more intensive time cutting and trial-and-error over the weekends. The electronics portion for me took a little less time than that. Although I haven't use a raspberry PI before there are so many great tutorials online that getting it running was pretty easy. The retropie project along with Adafruit's Retrogame project made the software aspect of this very easy.
I'm a consumer of open source, both software and designs, and I wanted to contribute these plans back to the community. Take them and make them better, use them directly, sell them, whatever you want. All of these projects that people work on utilize open source and it is a real shame when people and companies don't give back. I worked at Amazon for 8.5 years and I was always a little bit uncomfortable with Amazon's consumption but lack of participation in open source. As a senior principal engineer at Amazon I was never given the option to participate in a meaningful way in open source projects and it was clear that there would be significant hurdles if I ever decided to pursue that myself. I now work at Facebook and it is only after working here for the last two years and observing their constant commitment to contributing back to the community, that I fully understand how important it is to contribute back.
These are the complete plans for building your own miniature arcade. You could buy the materials at your local plastics or hardware store (my favorite plastics store is Tap Plastics in Seattle, and my favorite wood store is Rockler) and take the files down to your local Makerspace and cut the physical cabinet in an hour or two. I'm including the full parts list that I've used in my build. All of the parts fit perfectly within the cabinet.
The links to the parts are all to Adafruit and Sparkfun. These are both amazing stores. I know that you could easily find all of the parts cheaper at other stores but these two companies are committed to enabling the community of builders. Their videos, tutorials, open source libraries and discussion boards are more than worth a few extra bucks out of my pocket. In fact their support has enabled me to learn and do a lot of the fun things that I've done over the past two years. I would urge you all to purchase from these two companies.
I'm not including here the wiring and circuit diagram for this project. It is pretty easy to figure this stuff out. If you have any problems then feel free to contact me and I would be more than happy to help you work through any issues that you run into.
Software: Win32 Disk Imager: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/files/latest/download RetroPie Image: http://blog.petrockblock.com/retropie/retropie-downloads/ Adafruit Retrogame: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Retrogame
Hardware: Raspberry Pi Model B
Monitor - HDMI 4 Pi: 7" 800x480:
Speakers:
Audio Amplifier:
Joystick:
Rocker switch:
Panel mount 2.1mm DC Barrel Jack
Power cord 5v 2A
Inline power wire connector (female)
Inline power wire connector (male)
HDMI Male to Male Cable
Acrylic
3 Sheets of 16.25 x 11.5" 0.25 Extruded
- $12 each at Tap Plastics
2 sheets of 14.75 x 10.5" 0.25 Extruded
- $10 each at Tap Plastics
1 sheet of 10" x 8 1/8" Red Cast
- $10 at Tap Plastics
1 sheet of 10" x 8 1/8" Clear Cast
- $10 at Tap Plastics