Rasberry Pi Arcade Booth

Have you ever wanted to play the games of yesterday, today? Well now you can with the Rasberry Pi Arcade booth. It gives you the high definition of a modern video game with the nostalgia feel of a wood or cardboard booth. Its amazing, period.

Created by: Jack Keeton, Rodolfo Leveiza, and Edwin Muñoz

You will need...
A raspberry Pi or other mini computer system
An HDMI cord
Monitor
Power cord for monitor
Controller (optional)
Sd card
Sd card reader (optional)
Cardboard or other material
A way of cutting your material such as scissors, Exacto-knife, or laser cutter
Spray paint, duct tape, colored paper, to color the booth
Power cord for the Rasberry Pi
Tape or glue
Hummingbird computer chip and program with functional LEDs

When starting your arcade booth you will need to design the pieces. We lasercutted our pieces out of OnShape, but if you are cutting yours by hand, you can just design with a ruler and pen/pencil. Also if you do not know how to use onshape, there are many resources and tutorials on their website. Our dimensions for our pieces are and all dimensions are in inches, First image: A 10 x 18 rectangle with a 1 x 9 rectangle attactched on top you will need two of these, Second Image: A 4.25 x 8 rectangle with a 8 x 1.5 triangle on top you will need two of these, Third image: A 21 x 1 rectangle, Fourth Image: A 15.25 x 21 rectangle, Fifth Image: A 9 x 21 rectangle you will need two of these, Sixth Image A 4.25 x 21 rectangle. Please remember that these dimensions are in inches and are the dimensions for a 15 x 19 monitor so you might have to adjust your design as needed. Your finished product will look like this.

Now that you've designed your peices according to the size of your monitor, we must cut them out. You may cut them out with someting as intricate as a laser cutter or something as simple as scissors. We used a laser cutter, but cutting the cardboard with scissors on pre-drawn lines works just as well. The first image above should look like your cardboard after drawing the dimensions of one piece, and the second image should be the piece once you've cut it out. Do this process of cutting for all the peices and don't forget some will need to be cut more then once.

Now that you've cut out all of your pieces, it's time for assembly. If you remember all the way back at the designing step, we designated certain pieces to certain images (look left to right on the pictures). Now with the diagram above, we must assemble the pieces together with glue and tape. We used wood glue and scotch tape, but most glues and tapes will work.

For the final part of assembling the cover for the arcade booth, you can color the booth. We used spray paint and duct tape, but anything with color would work. After you have colored your booth, you now have a cover for your monitor. You can also tape some LEDS aroundthe cover by using a hummingbird circuit board. There are tutorials on the hummingbrid website and Youtube that can teach you how to add some extra flare with the hummingbird. Now we are going to learn how to play retro games on the monitor.

The first process is downloading the OS onto the Pi itself. I started off by downloading it from this website : http://www.recalbox.com/ or from https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-os/releases .

If you have a clean SD card you can skip this step.

This step will be formatting the SD card, to make sure the it is completely wiped and has nothing to conflict it.

You can find a website for this but I used this https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

Here you plug in the SD card and match it with the picture.

Basically you extract the files from ZIP file from the downloaded OS and paste that into the SD card.
If there is a problem transferring the files, redo the past couple of steps.

Plug the SD card into the Pi and you should be all set and wait for the OS to fully load up!

Plug in the controller or Keyboard, press Enter on the Keyboard and go to "controllers settings" and just follow the steps shown.

You should then be able to cover up the monitor base and the cords with the cover you made, and now you have your Rasberry Pi Arcade Booth!