Saturday, October 15, 2016

Project Roadrunner's Barcade: Planning

Occasionally this blog will be the destination for other projects than my normal miniatures painting. This new project is one such situation. So for all my followers that don't care about this, sorry. You can merrily skip anything that starts with "Project Roadrunner's Barcade" or are tagged with "barcade".

So what is this? It's pretty simple. My son (who is in 1st grade) wasn't able to join the local coding class due to many factors. So I decided that a project at home was a good alternative. Coincidentally a friend and co-worker had sent me pictures of the bar-top arcade that he built. There's a ton of tutorials online for this so I'm not going to spend a ton of time explaining how we build ours. Instead I'm going to document the details that we need to keep track of and the fun that we're having building it together.

First some links:
This guide is a primary source for details.
This one also though which is linked from this Reddit post.

Today we went ahead and ordered a bunch of parts:
Raspberry Pi 2 with power supply and plastic case and heat sinks
Arcade joysticks and buttons with controller card
19" LCD flat panel monitor
Power cord inlet
Micro SD card

There's a bunch more stuff we'll need eventually, and I'll certainly need tools, but first I want to get the basics together. Our first task once the parts start to arrive will be to assemble the control console I think, which will require wood and tools as well as some electronic assembly. I'm also planning to get some plexiglass cut for key pieces of the cabinet, such as the controls console. There's a local place that I can get that done at a local plastics specialty place.

Updates will be sporadic as we make progress. Wish us luck!

Other less important links:
This place sells pre-cut panels which I may go to if I get sick of doing all the MDF cutting myself.
This is a smaller module version that plugs into the TV. Here's another version

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