Homemade Arcade Cabinet (powered by Raspberry Pi)

I bought a Raspberry Pi a few months ago, imagining that I could build something cool with it. (This is basically the same reason that I can’t throw anything away — I was almost more excited about the possibility of finding a use for it in the future than I was about actually using it.) Luckily, I came upon this article from Lifehacker, which inspired me to build a small arcade cabinet for my apartment. I liked the idea because it seemed difficult enough to force me to learn some new things, but not so difficult that I would just give up halfway through.

Since I already had the Pi, I decided to start by setting it up as a game emulator using RetroPie. I won’t go into the details of that here, since I just followed the instructions from the Lifehacker article exactly. I don’t remember encountering any issues during the process, other than wondering again whether having such an absurdly complicated Wi-Fi password is worth the trouble. (It is; keep the faith.) (For some reason I wasn’t able to get audio through the HDMI connection initially. I had to do some config-file editing and SSHing and stuff like that that I really don’t understand very well to get it to work, but then in the end it didn’t matter because I used a pair of external speakers in the final build.)

At this point the only materials I had used were the Raspberry Pi, a MicroSD card (32 GB), a power source (an iPhone charger and a Micro USB cable), an HDMI cable, a USB keyboard, and an Xbox 360 controller, most of which I had lying around in my apartment.

I had planned on buying a cheap monitor and using an Arduino to make an arcade-style controller (like in this article), but luckily a friend of mine had a monitor and a USB arcade controller that he was willing to give me.

I popped open the monitor’s plastic casing to get the screen out, and removed the bezel to paint it black

The monitor didn’t have an HDMI input, so I bought this HDMI-VGA converter from Amazon for $12

Getting this saved me a whole lot of trouble

I bought a pair of desktop speakers from the DI for $8 and opened them up so that I could mount them inside the cabinet.

With this I had everything that needed to fit inside the cabinet, so I started drawing up some designs and figuring out exactly how much wood I would need.

This was easily the most time-consuming part of the whole process. Also this required a lot more trigonometry than I expected. So there you go kids, it will come in handy after the test

After that I went to Home Depot and started looking at plywood. I was about to buy a jigsaw when I decided to call my dad and ask his opinion on the best way to secure the sides to the base. (If it’s not clear yet, my ambition in this case very much exceeded my knowledge.) I’m glad that I did, because if I hadn’t, this would have taken me a whole lot longer and would not have turned out nearly as well.

So I bought the plywood, some L brackets, carriage bolts, and an acrylic sheet. That night I sketched out the shapes that I would need to cut out, and the next day I went over to my dad’s place to get his help with the assembly and use his tools that I definitely did not have access to at my apartment.

I don’t own a protractor (to my shame), so I made my own guide for the angles I needed to draw

Once I got there, I cut out the pieces with a jigsaw and we assembled them using the L brackets and Gorilla Glue. I used some 1/4" plywood for the top face of the cabinet (meant to sit flush with the top of the controller). For the sound, we drew up a grid and I drilled out a whole bunch of holes in the top face, and then we mounted the speakers to the back with glue and let it set overnight.

The base and sides with the controller mounted inside

Drilling holes in the face for the speakers (this took forever)

The attached face with the speakers mounted inside

Side view

After that we put the screen in (initially it was pretty much entirely held in by pressure from the side pieces, but later I threw a bunch of Gorilla Glue in there all along the sides) and I connected everything just to make sure that I hadn’t broken the speakers or the screen during the assembly process.

It works! (The clamp was there while some glue was setting)

Then we cut down the acrylic sheet to cover the screen and drilled some holes to mount it. After this I took it back to my apartment, bought some paint from Home Depot, and spent the next day or so sanding and then painting the outside. Since I’m not creative, I just made the whole thing black. Once the paint was dry I put in all the electronics and put the acrylic sheet back on to protect the screen. (I got an extension cord for the inside so that the whole cabinet would just have one power cable coming out of it.)

Waiting for the paint to dry; the guts

With this it was pretty much finished. I had to do a bit more work to get the arcade controller to work with all of the games that I had installed (which was more difficult than I expected in some cases.)

The “finished” cabinet, including the screen-protecting acrylic sheet

Since the Pi has built-in WiFi, I can access it from my computer and install new games whenever I want really easily, so I’ll probably keep doing that. I still haven’t built a back for the cabinet, but I’m not really in a hurry for that, since I need to access the inside pretty frequently (most often to attach a keyboard so that I can get out of the few games that I haven’t gotten to work with the arcade controller yet.) But for the most part, everything works great and it’s a lot of fun. As I suspected I would, I learned a lot during the process. And like I said before, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it (at least not nearly as well) without my dad’s help, so I’m glad I got it.

I would highly recommend trying something like this if you’re at all interested. If you do, let me know and we can compare notes!