From brick to bartop

[Thorr69]

Greetings, all! I have a project I have been working on that I thought about making into a RPi project but ended up going in another direction. However, I think it's still cool and wanted to share.

It started one day when I was perusing Facebook Marketplace and saw an iCade for sale:

I have a Samsung Galaxy tablet and thought this would something I could use. It was $10 and I couldn't resist. I figured that even if it didn't work, I would have some cheap arcade parts. What I didn't know is that the bluetooth in this thing is old and doesn't conform to modern standards. It uses an 8 digit pin when connecting which is no longer allowed. So, I had a neat looking $10 paperweight.

At this point I thought I might put a RPi project together for it. I figured I could hook the stick and buttons to GPIO pins or perhaps to a USB encoder. But that would mean buying a screen, speakers, and the encoder. I didn't want to spend any money. I looked for a way to use my table as just a screen, but no dice. The tablet is nice and self contained. It runs Retroarch pretty well and I wanted to use it for this enclosure. I have wireless 8BitDo controllers that would work, but it just didn't seem right. So I got an idea. I have one of these 8BitDo Arcade sticks that works with the tablet just fine:

That stick is a few inches wider than the iCade, so i thought that maybe I could take the guts of this stick and wire it to the controls of the iCade. I took the iCade apart:

When I got inside the two of them, I realized that the top button row needs a place to live and the iCade just doesn't have a good spot for it.
So... what to do. Well, I decided I wanted to leave arcade stick intact and still turn this thing into a bartop. So I took the center out. I cut my losses on the controls. I kept the side panels. I had a small sheet of 5/8" particle board handy, so I decided to use that and make new center pieces shown below. (I painted them black, but the paint job is not complete yet.)

I wanted to keep the original assembly hardware so I drilled them up to fit the side panels as-is. This included recreating the flip-up top. I put it together and it looks like this:

When I put the tablet and the arcade stick in place, I get the finished product:

It' still incomplete, but it is totally functional. I will be finishing the paint job and making adjustments to the flip-top so that it sits properly in place. The arcade stick has mounting holes under it. I plane to add pegs in the support shelf to hold in place and keep it from sliding (while still making it easy to lift out). I am also working on so brackets that will hold the tablet in place vertically and also serve as a lift for placing the tablet horizontally. The auto-rotation ability of the tablet makes switching super easy.

In the end, it's a lovely bartop frame and completely wireless. I am looking at adding a powered USB hub to plug in the tablet and joystick as a means of keeping it from draining the batteries all the time. I can easily mount in on the back and find a way to snake the wires invisibly. I am happy with how it has turned out so far, though.