3/5 Scale Arcade Cabinet
I was inspired to create this by a similar build by Alex Weber, featured on Hackaday. I wanted to build a small arcade cabinet that could be easily moved around, as I had yet to move into my house. The authentic CRT feeling was essential for me and the smaller 14 inch TVs are much easier to find than the larger sizes so Alex’s project was interesting. I found a 14 inch CRT TV at Value Village for $10 and started building the cabinet around it.
The cabinet is based off drawings for a Galaga cabinet found here. I altered the design to trim off the bottom 3 inches to accommodate some caster wheels. Compared to Alex’s build, my cabinet uses dado grooves or rabbets to hold the middle panels and I used wood veneer edge banding to cover the exposed plywood edges. I applied a black paint to the whole cabinet and I do have plans to add some graphics to the sides. For now I have been using the cabinet as a collection spot for all of my stickers.
The controls are directly connected to an ATmega32U4 development board loaded with QMK firmware. The controller board is connected to the Raspberry Pi via USB and the controls are mapped to the keyboard keys. The Raspberry Pi is running Lakka, a Linux distribution based on RetroArch. I chose the Raspberry Pi because it has a builtin composite video output, which is required for the CRT TV.