Now that winter is beginning, it is the peak season to stay home and do some personal project. If you are very handy or you like to mess around, the Instructables Circuits website is surely a mine for you. On this platform, people from all over the world upload the projects they have created with their hands accompanied by very complete tutorials showing how to do them step by step.
The variety of the web is impressive. From obtaining the blueprints to building your own doll of Squid Game even browsing through a tutorial to create a mechanized robot to operate a GoPro camera remotely. There are almost 100,000 projects uploaded to the web, although most are related to the robotics and electronics.
Make your own type wooden arcade machine Bartop
If you are a fan of the arcade games, the tutorial that Tony Vanpoucke has published in Instructables Circuits is definitely for you. This is a step-by-step guide to build an arcade machine at home Bartop for two players. And we are not talking about any crappy crafts. The plans that this user has uploaded to the platform allow to make a High quality wooden bartop, even surpassing the housings that are sold in the market to carry out this type of projects. Oh, and no using saws or jigsaws. This expert invites you directly to look for a company that will make you laser cuts if you do not have one of these machines on hand. It may seem a bit exaggerated for a project «Do it yourself‘, But the result is definitely worth it.
The guide shows all the steps and tools necessary to carry out the project. The only complexity is really the cutting of the wood. Regarding the components, there is a list and we can choose one or other elements depending on the budget that we are interested in using for the project. It offers us enough freedom to choose the total number of buttons or the screen aspect ratio, for example, so our arcade machine will end up acquiring a unique and personal look.
Raspberry Pi and Emulation Station remain inseparable
The brain of this fantastic arcade machine could not be anything other than a Raspberry Pi. In the tutorial it does not show exactly the model that we should buy, although since approximately the second generation, any Raspberry Pi (with the exception of the Zero model) is capable of moving any arcade game without messing up. The most recent ones are capable of emulating the consoles of the late 90s totally without problems and they are starting to target the next generation.
The installation procedure for both hardware and software is perfectly detailed on the web. In addition, we can use up to four operating systems different to launch Emulation Station: Recalbox, Batocera, Retropie or Lakka. Vanpoucke invites us to install the one we like the most based on its interface.
Finally, the whole project has Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC). That is, you can use it without problems as long as you cite the original author and do not sell the project plans.
