Bartop Arcade Cabinet Build Skips The Kit

January 14, 2018 by 7 Comments

An arcade cabinet is one of those things that every gamer wants at home, but few ever get. Getting a real arcade cabinet is usually expensive, and building one yourself is no small feat. There are kits you can get now which help the process along, generally taking the form of pre-cut cabinet parts, but with them comes the quiet shame of kit-building. What if your friends found out you used a kit instead of designing it yourself? The drama is almost too much to think about.

That’s how [Bogdan Berg] felt about it, at least. Not content with just getting a pre-cut cabinet kit from eBay, he decided to design and build his own bartop arcade machine in just one week: fast enough for him to fit the whole thing into his Christmas vacation. We don’t know what Christmas was like for his friends and family this year with him toiling away on this beautiful build the whole time, but we can confidently say his Christmas was awesome.

He designed the cabinet in Fusion 360, working around the limitation that the laser cutter he had access to had a work area of 24 inches by 18 inches. Some interesting design choices were made here, including going with a tab and slot construction method. While [Bogdan] admits that this aesthetic isn’t always popular, he liked how sturdy it makes the final product.

He was originally going to use plywood for the cabinet, but owing to the fact that he couldn’t find any pieces that weren’t warped locally, he switched over to MDF. Using MDF did mean he had to seal all the cut pieces with shellac before painting, but in the end he’s happy with the final lacquer paint job; even if it did take more work and materials than he anticipated.

The hardware is pretty much the standard for DIY arcades these days: a 17 inch LCD monitor he had laying around is used for the display, a two player joystick and button kit from Amazon provides the user interface, and emulation is provided by a Raspberry Pi 3 running RetroPie. A recessed door in the rear allows him to get into the machine will still maintaining a finished look on the backside.

While the size of them may vary wildly, DIY arcade cabinets are always a popular project. Whether shamelessly emblazoned with our logo or playing host to glorious LED lighting, it seems like the design of these cabinets provide as much entertainment as the games they play.

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Interactive Board Prompts Moves For Checkers And Chess

April 16, 2017 by 6 Comments

In terms of equipment, chess and checkers are simple games — just a handful of pieces and a checkered gameboard. The simplicity belies the underlying complexity of the games, though, and goes a long way toward explaining their popularity over the millennia.

Increasing the complexity with an interactive game board for chess and checkers might seem counterintuitive, then. But [Bogdan Berg]’s project aims to not only teach checkers and chess but to make games a little more exciting and engaging. Looking a little like a tabletop version of the interactive dance floors we’ve been seeing a lot of lately, the board is built from laser-cut acrylic with plywood dividers to isolate all 64 squares. Neopixels and Hall-effect sensors are mounted to custom PCBs that stretch the length of a row and are wired to an Arduino Mega with lots of IO. Game pieces are colorful fridge magnets. [Bogdan]’s current program supports checkers and keeps track of where the pieces have been moved relative to their starting position and prompts users with possible legal moves.

[Bogdan]’s board already looks like a lot of fun in the video below, and we like the quality of the build and the unobtrusive nature of the interactivity. When he gets around to implementing chess, though, he might want something fancier than fridge magnets for game pieces.

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ESP32 Hamster Wheel Tracker Tweets Workout Stats

May 27, 2017 by 21 Comments

Even with all the hamster wheel trackers out there (and on this site) there’s room for improvement. [Bogdan] upgraded his hamster wheel from an Arduino and datalogging shield to an ESP32, and unleashed some new capabilities one does not ordinarily associate with hamster wheels.

[Bogdan]’s project logs distance in feet, duration of current session in time, RPM, overall revolutions, speed in MPH, and overall number of sessions, as well as a couple of system monitoring stats. It also tracks multiple wheels, as [Piontek] (the hamster) has two. However, thanks to the ESP32, [Bogdan]’s wheel tracker tweets its stats and updates a ThingSpeak dashboard with [Piontek]’s workouts.

In addition to its functionality, [Bogdan] made a point to make the project look and feel FINISHED. He designed custom 3D parts including a front plate, hooks for attaching the control box to the cage, and mounts for attaching the sensor to the wheel.

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