icade pi 2 project

[peanutwarrior]

Picked an icade case up for a tenner and decided to convert it. the panels that are white are clear, the protective film is still on them. The bezel is laser cut to fit an ipad2 screen which I obtained from a broken ipad.the material used is sprayed black mdf to keep it light yet give a smooth finish. Speakers sit at the top with the works being fitted on the back behind a cut box. I’ve tried to keep the lines as clean as possible. The controls are re wired to a usb encoder. Apart from graphics and a vga driver board for the screen the project is nearly finished. The usb is an extended ribbon that fits underneath to easily update.

[peanutwarrior]

Few photos showing how to mount the ipad screen, it’s a tight fit and could be designed better but it holds the screen firmly without glue marks.

[peanutwarrior]

Just needs vga driver board. Shell complete

[mavic19]

looks good! Nice job!

[peanutwarrior]

wasn’t a fan of the ion artwork so striped off graphics. Finish left is a little rough so sanded and applied hi build primer.

[peanutwarrior]

Sides have been primed and sanded. had to remove all black trim from sides as spray paint ate into them. Glued all components behind screen. Pi sits underneath where the batteries used to this allows detachment.

[peanutwarrior]

Another shot

[peanutwarrior]

If anyone ever tries this don’t spray the sides the spray paint damages the edging trim. I’d made copies of these side panels and used black vynal straight over the decals and trimmed with a knife. The carbon material looks good, not sure all over. Removing marquee sign for something more fitting. Side art images and buttons.

[peanutwarrior]

Took the joystick apart removed front red power light and swapped it for the infra red sensor and power led from the vga driver. The vga driverboard has enough juice in its usb to drive the pi. End result being the tv remote powers both the screen and pi by pointing at the fake coin slot.

[peanutwarrior]

Extending power cables to front light. Running lvds cable to front, leaving pi and driverboard at the back of the screen. Coin slot turns green to show on, red for standby.

[peanutwarrior]

Cheers, not as nice as your full size one, just don’t have the space.

[peanutwarrior]

Just waiting on replacement lcd cable and usb lamp to come. The lamp consists of 12 led that runs off a usb port. the tv board is quite detailed and provides additional sources of power. the speakers ran off a cheap usb amp which sounded awful so ditched that and used the tv boards built in amplifer. everything par the screen is running off a 12v adapter.

A back cover hides the wires and the top lid provides access to the micro sd. so far so good, downside is marquee is far too wide, I couldn’t gain any more vertical room so most images unless altered look stretched.

[peanutwarrior]

Sourcing how to light the marquee as bright as possible. Bought a usb led desk lamp glued into place, the 5v is powered from the vga board with a switch on the lamp to turn on and off. the light was £4 and works a treat. cable still not arrived so no working screen. Sanwa buttons and joysticks arriving. I found for £2 car cjrome trim at 12mm wide which is the same thickness as the icade side panels, hopefully a cheap t mould effect.

[peanutwarrior]

This is the marquee lit

[peanutwarrior]

Sanwa controls arrived. Carbon fibre vynal added to sides and front. Marquee light controlled by pressing hex screw. Side art symbols and chrome trim next.

[peanutwarrior]

Cable arrived today, screen works a treat although sods law the screen frame was the wrong way round for the lcd, so file and packed edges. The screen is slightly off center so filed frame on one side greater to straighten out. The tv vga driver runs off 12v and that runs the marquee light the screen the pi and the sound amplifer. Pleaser with the result except the encoder is knackered so adding a xbox360 board instead. Nearly complete.

[peanutwarrior]

Apart from trying to force the sound through hdmi, which worked on recalbox, retropie is having non of it at the moment, the icade is running, I ditched all the switches and used sanwa which are connected through a usb snes controller board. An extra smaller sanwa button was fitted at the front to allow easy exit of a game.

I used the heated barrel of a soldering iron on all edges of the vynal which created a better finish. Just waiting on chrome trim, side stickers and figuring out how to make a more permanent marquee light control.

the mid section now pulls apart separate, if this could be copied it would make a nice conversion kit to icade that wouldn’t require hacking to fit.

I’ll post final photos and any detailed parts. In all minus the pi 2 you would be looking at around £100 for parts. That’s if you can find a cheap icade as a Base.

[meat]

Looks professional! casually blending into your desk space. =D

[peanutwarrior]

Carbon fiber vynal added to all panels, used a hot air dryer to pull round corners. Filled in slot that used to hold ipad with filler, sanded and carbon fiber vynal added. Slot cut in old for marquee. TV board hidden behind screen now. Final touch chrome car trim on edges.

[ptitneo]

This is amazing work. Congrats! Would you mind sharing the details/files for the mid section that you designed (screen support, top part for speakers, and bezel)? Thanks!

[fnwoz]

This is exactly what I am looking to do with an old iCade I picked up online for ten bucks. Any chance you can post some additional information on the screen setup. I see there are ipad 2 lcd replacements on eBay as well as VGA driver boards but I want to make sure I don’t need any other ribbon cables or connections to get them to function. Any information you can provide on this would be appreciated. The 4:3 ratio is much better then 16:9. Thank you.

[peanutwarrior]

The vga driver board was ordered off ebay from a china supplier, I ordered the one with the remote which came in at about £25, when you order you leave in the order comments the type of screen you have and the supplier gives you the correct cable. It’s pretty much plug and play. I have two different types, the cheaper version at £19 has no remote but is plug and play it just works, the dearer one however had to have a firmware update in order for the ipad screen to work with it. What wasn’t included was a 12v transformer, so you will need to pick one of those up.

I have two icades, one running retropie using a raspberry pi2 and another running a NVidia shield portable, left the console out one day and my dogs had chewed it up a fair bit, so I modified it with a quick release plug so it could still be used as a portable but currently sits permanently in the back of the icade running hyperspin.

I do prefer the setup of retropie better, much cleaner interface.

to save effort buy the more expensive vga driverboard as they have the remote and a built in amplifier for external speakers, plus an external 5v USB this will power your pi. With a 12v 2amp transformer you can run everything purely from that, no need for separate cables for speakers and hard drives etc.

[peanutwarrior]

I made a few different designs for the screen framework. the first relied on being fixed to the side panels of the icade, this although worked, meant it was difficult to take apart again.

my final designs were drawn on CAD and laser cut, purely because I could not achieve an accurate surround for the screen and the tolerances were so small.
the frame is made of 3mm MDF and glued with PVA and then hot melt glued in the corners to add strength.

The lid section of the icade has a 4mm wide groove cut underneath to allow the Perspex marquee to sit in to create a tight seal. two pieces of perspex sandwich an inkjet printed marquee graphic.

the speaker sections is merely a rectangular piece of MDF with laser cut speaker holes.

[ptitneo]

Thanks for the details. I drew my own design and did a couple of tests on laser cut cardboard. I’ll go with 3mm MDF as well for the final cut. I don’t have the proper tools to cut the groove in the icade’s lid though (which was a great idea) so I’ll have to find something else for that bit.

[greenlanternprime]

I’m in the process of doing the exact same thing, don’t suppose you have any links for the lcd controller board? I can’t find any with USB ports on them, and like the idea of running the whole thing off one power import.

[ptitneo]

I had the same goal. I ended up ordering this controller board and built a power cable for it that plugs into an USB socket.

The good news is, it works. The 5V are plenty enough when plugged directly to a 2A USB power supply. The bad news is that it doesn’t work so well when plugged to the Raspberry (+controlblock, which would’ve allowed me to power everything up and down using the controlblock’s power switch). The backlight flickers. I’ve read somewhere that reducing the brightness might help but I don’t want to do that, so right now I’m using 2 separate USB cables, one for the raspberry and one for the lcd, both plugged the same dual-output USB charger.

[peanutwarrior]

if anyone is removing the standard graphics on the side of the icade, I highly recommend the black textured vinyl off ebay, cheap to buy yet gives as close to the texture as the rest of the icade. I removed parts of the vinyl carbon fibre as compared to this textured vinyl it’s just not as hard wearing. I can’t decide on side graphics yet so going black / carbon fibre

I took the panels apart and applied the vinyl, trimed with a sharp blade and ran the hot barrel of a soldering iron all around the edges, this removed any loose edges.

[Author]

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