Arcade box project

By Ward Dehairs, February 6, 2021

Using some newly acquired soldering equipment and a spare arduino I decided to try building a home made arcade box. I ordered the remaining components online, including an LED matrix, some arcade buttons, jumper cables and a power supply. After taking the appropriate measurements I went on to design a box to be lasercut. I worked out the design in Blender, then sliced up the walls to generate a lasercut bleuprint. After coding up some games I ended up with this.

Coding up the games provided some much needed practice using c++, though I would not recommend this approach, seeing as Arduino has some odd restrictions and can be quite difficult to debug.

Gluing the components together was the easiest part, wiring and soldering was quite difficult seeing as I had no standardized connectors for the arcade buttons. I'm still not sure what the best approach here would have been, but I ended up soldering leftover resistor legs to them, to make it easy to connect the jumper cables.

The result is not too reliable, but is more than enough as a prototype.

I also decided to simply use a square of paper to soften the glare of the LEDs and create a more pleasant screen, though some sort of foam might have been preferrable.

If you'd like to make one of these yourself, I'm happy to share details and code, just send me an e-mail. Or perhaps I should just start a business making these per order.