You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...

Zigurana

Hey people!
After a long while, I've finally - Finally! - finished the second iteration of my bartop arcade, Retropie themed!

Design Constraints

We are the 'proud' owner of a closet / cabinet manufactured by a certain Swedish furniture giant :

To achieve a sufficiently high SAF (spouse acceptance factor), the bartop will need to be stored in one of these 33cm x 33cm x 33cm spaces.

Screen

This is enough to accommodate a 15 inch 4:3 screen, provided that is would have very little bevel. After a lot of searching, I concluded that the only lcd screen acceptable would be one coming from an old laptop, as standalone screens all have about 2cm of bevel around all edges. I sourced an old laptop screen that operates at 1024x768.
To drive this via HDMI, I looked up the display type, and ordered an aftermarket display driver that was custom flashed to suit the screen (thank you eBay!).

Casing material

I did not like the finish on my previous build, (which was made of Plywood and MDF), so I went for something that did not need painting to look nice, and was durable to boot.
To house the screen and Rpi, I opted to use a high pressure laminate (HPL) plate material. This is sometimes better known under the brand name Trespa. It is a very strong and dense material, often used in exterior building applications (and toilet stalls etc). Using woodworking tools, it is possible to cut and sand and route it like (very) hard wood. The edges can be polished smooth and don't need additional finishing.
This material allowed me to route a slot for the screen, being only 4mm deep without having to fear breakouts.
Cutting the 30mm holes for the buttons was a pain in the ass tough. I had to order special TCT holesaws (and replace a drill press) to manage it.
Also, because it is so very dense, it's heavy. The completed setup weights in at about 8kg! Together with some anti-slip pads on the bottom, this prevents enthusiastic players from swiping the machine from the table in the heat of the game.
The final advantage of HPL is that its available in many colors on the faces, but the inside is always black. This resulted in a nice high-contrast look, without having to use edge-bands of any kind.

Controls

The controls consist of a Sanwa JLF-TPRG-8AYT-SK Silent Arcade Joystick and six Sanwa OBSFS-30 Silent Snap In Arcade Buttons. These are hooked up to the (in)famous Dragonrise USB controller.

For sound I butchered the Logitech S150 USB driven speakerset. This one acts as an external sound card and amplifier in one. This results in much better sound quality than when I used the 3.5mm plug.
The S150 has three buttons (volume down, mute and volume up) which I wired to the front panel:

Also there are some additional buttons that will be used to trigger functions normally acessed via hotkey combo's. I'm not sure if I'll keep these wired via the USB controller, or if that will work better via GPIO.

Other items on the front panel are: two USB extensions for wired controllers and an additional on/off button wired to GPIO 5-6 for switching the RPi to low/power mode and back on.
(Also some holes for a future fan)

Pictures

Playtesting:

And finally:

Nicely stored!

obsidianspider

Sounds like a very neat project, but your pictures (aside from the first one of the shelf) don't seem to be in the post.

mattrixk

None of you pictures are loading for me. I think you need to put the image title in the square brackets and the image link in the round brackets.

Zigurana

@obsidianspider : Yeah, those damn smartphones nowadays take pictures with enough pixels to print billboards @ 300 dpi. After resizing the images I was able to upload them all.

Btw: I forgot the bonus:

The top panel comes off (held in place by neodynium magnets) so I can store a small keyboard and mouse/controller.

obsidianspider

@Zigurana VERY nicely done, sir! How did you make the artwork?

GtBFilms

Really nice work.

Usually it's the internal dimensions in a cab we have to worry about, but you've had to deal with the external size too. It looks very professional, IKEA should put a photo in their catalogue!

caver01

@Zigurana Just fantastic! Very well done. I appreciate the descriptions of the materials. Most of us are "makers" here, so it's always nice to find out about interesting materials. It seems like that stuff has a lot of benefits, but the density makes it a little harder to work with. I am curious, how did you add the artwork? I assume you chose white material, but are the decals just stickers? Paint?

I like the collection of admin buttons. Are you controlling volume and mute via the logitech guts or are you sending commands via GPIO? And what are the other icons for? One looks like a save (diskette) and a folder.

I absolutely love the handle in the back to match other shelving drawers. That's a nice touch to make it fit well with the other shelf cubbies.

caver01

@Zigurana Also, you are using USB audio. How's that working? I effectively abandoned mine a while back and now just use the analog jack. I kept running into problems with volume commands--basically anything that tries to interact with the mixer controls would run into problems because my USB interface wasn't called "PCM" it was called "Headphones" or something. I hope I am making sense. It has been a while since I switched out USB, so maybe some progress has been made. What's your experience?

meleu

I loved everything! Mainly the pixelized fonts!
I certainly would spend a lot of time playing Seaquest (Atari 2600) in this gorgeous build!

BuZz

Looks great! :)

mediamogul

@Zigurana

Very nice and such an original idea. I especially love the hidden compartment for the mouse and keyboard. I did something similar with my cabinet build, using a small sliding shelf. As much as we try to hide it to the casual observer, these things are still computers and having a really slick way to access a mouse and keyboard is a big help.

Very keen!

Riverstorm

@Zigurana said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

To drive this via HDMI, I looked up the display type, and ordered an aftermarket display driver that was custom flashed to suit the screen (thank you eBay!).

What was this part? Nice job and creative with the shelving. I wasn't real sure of the necessity of a fan but I threw one in, just in case too. At a minimum some type of passive cooling as a completely sealed box seems dangerous but I guess they do it with cell phones and everything else these days. I agree with Media that small cubby is really slick. Now is the inside as tidy as the outside! ;)

Zigurana

@Everyone: Thanks so much for the kind words!

@caver01 said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

I am curious, how did you add the artwork? I assume you chose white material, but are the decals just stickers? Paint?

I like the collection of admin buttons. Are you controlling volume and mute via the logitech guts or are you sending commands via GPIO? And what are the other icons for? One looks like a save (diskette) and a folder.

The decals are stickers I had printed on transparent sticker foil (polyvinyl). I wish my painting skills are that good.
The buttons are wired via the original logitech buttons, but as it is all via USB, those actually register as a three-button keyboard sending vol+ / vol- / mute signals. Fine if you are using windows, but I am using triggerhappy to remap those to an actual command for amixer (I have some more notes if anyone needs them).

@caver01 said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

@Zigurana Also, you are using USB audio. How's that working? I effectively abandoned mine a while back and now just use the analog jack. I kept running into problems with volume commands--basically anything that tries to interact with the mixer controls would run into problems because my USB interface wasn't called "PCM" it was called "Headphones" or something. I hope I am making sense. It has been a while since I switched out USB, so maybe some progress has been made. What's your experience?

Getting the USB soundcard to be default took some work, but not as much as you would think. It's about setting the indexes and the order using a conf file in modprobe.d , just follow this link. I assuming that this works since I am using these buttons to send commands like /usr/bin/amixer sset PCM,0 2dB- (to reduce the volume) and those work fine.
In my opinion it is clearly worth the effort, as the sound is so much better, especially in my not-so-well-grounded build. :-)

@Riverstorm said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

@Zigurana said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

To drive this via HDMI, I looked up the display type, and ordered an aftermarket display driver that was custom flashed to suit the screen (thank you eBay!).

What was this part?

The LCD controller was this one (or same enough to make no difference). As long as the LCD model number is mentioned (exactly!) on the item description, you are good to go.

Zigurana

@obsidianspider said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

@Zigurana VERY nicely done, sir! How did you make the artwork?

Well, 'making' the artwork either consisted of:

Downloading the RetroPie.svg and tweaking the colors in Inkscape.
Recreating the pixelart, pixel perfect in Inkscape by stacking blocks ( they are only 15x15 or so, and its really quite relaxing, compared to debugging EmulationStation, let me tell you...)
Googling for fonts and icon packs to use. I ended up using a free minecraft type font, which I found spartan enough for this build.

@caver01 said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

And what are the other icons for? One looks like a save (diskette) and a folder.

The others are planned to act as a quick way to load (folder) and save (floppy disk) savestates, exit the game (door with arrow), and speedbrowse through the lists, although I am not sure of those yet, we'll see.
The project is slowly moving into the configuration stage, and I will probably harass you guys for the finer points on how to scrape and use overlays and whatnot.

caver01

@Zigurana said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

Getting the USB soundcard to be default took some work, but not as much as you would think. It's about setting the indexes and the order using a conf file in modprobe.d , just follow this link. I assuming that this works since I am using these buttons to send commands like /usr/bin/amixer sset PCM,0 2dB- (to reduce the volume) and those work fine.
In my opinion it is clearly worth the effort, as the sound is so much better, especially in my not-so-well-grounded build. :-)

Ok. I have used the techniques in that thread before too. I definitely had USB sound working, but the fact that you can issue volume commands this way either means you have a better interface than I do (more consistent with defaults) or that Jessie has evolved in this area a bit since I threw in the towel. I may have to re-open this can-o-worms on a test image again soon. USB audio was so much better!

obsidianspider

@Zigurana I think what I meant was how did you print the art, as opposed to creating it digitally? Did you go to a local shop to have it made? Print at home? Order from the Internet?

Zigurana

@obsidianspider said in You've shown me yours, I'll show you mine...:

@Zigurana I think what I meant was how did you print the art, as opposed to creating it digitally? Did you go to a local shop to have it made? Print at home? Order from the Internet?

There is a polyvinyl sticker product that you can print on yourself (both ink and laser), but I had this printed by some online printershop. Takes 24hrs, so that's fine.

PingSpike

Great build mate!!

I've also not heard of the SAF measurement unit before, great term :))

moosepr

Love it! That screen looks rather thin at the top, in guessing there is some kind of defused sheet over the front of the screen? Makes it look very tidy!

mattrixk

Looks amazing mate, well done.