Autodesk Arcade!

Salutations! My name is Tyler Erwin and I’m a senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Robotics at San Jose State University and a member of our university’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers Club (ASME).

For this project, I wanted to recreate the arcade games I enjoyed at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk as a kid as a portable desktop arcade! You can often find arcade games being sold at stores such as Best Buy for a whopping $500+. Additionally, finding a space in your household to store large arcade machines can often be very challenging and often isn't applicable.

Utilizing Sanwa arcade parts, an encoder, and a 7 inch display I was able to create a affordable arcade cabinet below $100! Furthermore, the arcade cabinet is within a 10 inch cubed volume, so it easy to store, place on your desktop, or display!

In order to 3D print the cabinet for my project, I utilized our club's Creality CR-10 printer and two spools of Matterhackers' Pro Series PLA and HTPLA. I chose red and blue as they are a common contrasting color choice for the cabinet to give it a clean look.

Additionally, in order to ensure the stability of the cabinet, I used some of the club's M3 screw inserts provided by ZYLtech engineering. These could be inserted with a soldering kit and ensured the rigid connection between portions of the cabinet.

As specified in the instruction, I also needed an encoder, a 7 inch LED display, and a set of buttons with a joystick.

The overall supplies list is as follows:

• Fusion 360 with Compatible Computer
• 2kg 1.75mm Matterhackers Pro Series PLA Filament
• This project can be recreated in any color scheme
• I used Blue PLA and Red HTPLA Filament
• 3D Printer with 10 x 10 x 10 inch minimum print volume
• I utilized Creality CR-10 Printer
• Cura Slicer
• 20 M3 Screws
• 4 #8 Screws
• 16 ZYLtech M3 Screw Inserts
• Caliper (Used for measuring the electronics and designing a cabinet, which is provided in this instructables submission)
• Longruner 7 Inch Capacitive Touch Screen TFT LCD Display
• Reyann Zero Delay Arcade USB Encoder
• Sanwa Joystick
• 8 Sanwa Buttons

The Sanwa Buttons were a press fit into a cylindrical hole, so modeling the insert wasn't much difficulty. To account for the tolerances on the printer, I made the holes the buttons insert into at 29.70 mm. However, I manually created a Sanwa Button using my caliper in order to represent the model in it's truest form. This was because the electronic connections underneath the button are important for the wiring to the encoder, so I wanted to ensure I created enough space.

I was able to design the entire model within Fusion 360 and have it look nearly identical to the original model without any use of the original part's specifications.

I followed a similar process for the joystick, but included images taken by my cellular device as a planar face image in order to replicate the flooring of the joystick. I ensured the entire top portion of the joystick was to the correct sizing to ensure the mounting of the joystick to the cabinet.

On this model I included the wiring diagram as well. The nice part about this design was no matter what directionality the joystick is placed the up, down, left, and right parameters can be specified in the general input settings of the emulator I was using, so I can easily set up my gaming experience!

The final electronic component I modelled was the LED Screen. This was a very important model to create properly as the screen is built uneven in terms of the mounting points, which allows me to make the model the correct orientation when connecting to the cabinet.

This part was interesting as well because the part was designed with both millimeters and inches as a form of measurement, but with Fusion 360's software it was super easy to swap between the two!

I first started with the front and base plate of the cabinet, that are meant to store the Sanwa Buttons and Joystick. I did some research on various button layouts for arcade machines and decided on one that fit the 6 button layout. I modified the design based on the space available for the plate. The defining measurement of the cabinet was the inner width, that allowed for the HDMI to be plugged into the LCD screen. Thus, I was working with 280 mm of space most of the time.

I added some slots to the base plate to allow for ventilation an cooling of the system. I didn't want the inside to heat up and melt the plastic with extended use. Additionally I added labels using the text tool and a front logo to fill space. I later changed it to the ASME logo once I realized I wanted to use the logo on the top plate.

Once I had the buttons and joystick placed, I moved on to positioning the screen for the arcade. I decided upon a 15 degree angle for the viewing of the screen, as with most arcades the user is at an elevated position. I then reused the sketch from my LCD screen and inserted it onto the face of the screen plate. This ability to transfer the sketch in Fusion 360 made the modeling for this portion really easy for me!

As with most arcade games, the logo of the arcade game is placed on the top portion of the cabinet. Since I wasn't running any particular game on my cabinet I decided to utilize the Autodesk Logo to fill out the top plate. This was a later inspiration for the side panels so I was glad to have came to this decision. I hollowed out the inner core of this plate but left a support beam to help with the printing process.

I didn't end up printing these plates as I was worried about using too much of the filament and not allowing other students to use blue. I did design a slot for the wiring to exit so that the arcade looks enclosed. However in most instances the consumer won't see the rear of the arcade.

Using the redefining of the sketch plane, I was able to take each plate side profile I made and create a universal sketch of all the sketches combined. This allowed me to easily make the side panel and extrude it out. However, I found that once I had the model complete it felt incomplete without modeling a decal on the side panel. Often when you look at arcade cabinets they have a decal on the side panel to fill the space. Additionally this gravitates gamers to the cabinet as the side panel entices them to it. So for my side panel rather than printing out a sticker I wanted to embed a side panel decal using Fusion 360!

I utilized the circular patter tools to create some gears, then inserted some Autodesk symbols throughout the panel to make it look like the gears were pushing the symbols throughout the space. I then combined that sketch with the side panel sketch to make a border around the decal. It turned out really cool on the first attempt so I decided to keep it. However, in order to not have an inverted section on the opposite side of my sketch, I made a different decal on each side, though they look similar.

Once my model was completed I set all the mounting points to a 4.6 mm diameter to allow for the inserts to be soldered in. As previously mentioned I altered the hole parameters of the buttons so it was easier to push into place. Additionally, I added an extra hole insert to each spot involving a screw so the screw head would sit flush to the surface.

Now that all of the parts were modelled, I utilized Fusion 360's easy printing exportation tool to transfer the files into Cura's slicer program. From there, I printed all the parts on our Creality CR-10 printer!

In order to allow for the shortest print time possible, as you can tell by my modelling I set up the parts into plates so they could be printed flat then assembled. Each plate took between 12 to 36 hours to print. The printer was able to complete all the prints successfully and the parts came out really well. I attempted to stress test the printer by printing the top plate without support and that didn't turn out well, so I had to reprint the part.

Once all the blue parts were printed, I needed to add our inserts into them. In order to do so I utilized our club's soldering iron and placed the M3 insert tip on the end. I heated the soldering iron until it was hot enough to push the insert in then pushed in the insert. I repeated this process for each blue plate.

I then took the base plate and the front plate and began pushing in the buttons. I also took the joystick and screwed it into place using the #8 screws and a nut on the opposite side. In order to get the LCD into place I screwed it in using M3 screws and a nut on the opposite side.

Once all the parts were mounted in their respective condition I assembled the module by mounting the blue plates to one red plate using the M3 screws, then repeating the process on the opposite side of the red plate I first mounted.

Now that the cabinet was built, I needed to wire the components to the encoder. All the button wiring went to the lower rack of the encoder, and the joystick needed to have 5 pins connected to the encoder. The encoder doesn't provide a wiring layout because it was expected to come with a 5 pin connection wire but I ordered it twice and it didn't so I just wired it myself.

Once the encoder is wired it can be powered via USB, as well as the LCD screen. The LCD screen also has an HDMI cord to attach to a PC. It's pretty wild to think you can have this arcade running with just two USB ports and an HDMI. I could probably figure out a future wiring solution that makes it just one USB and an HDMI too!

Now that the cabinet is built and wired properly, you can start finding the games you'd like to play and run them on any PC. You can additionally run other games besides arcade games as the cabinet acts as a controller as well!

I want to make a new cabinet in the future that can fit up to two players. From my testing with one encoder, it would be fairly simple to implement a secondary controller. I may look to either create a cocktail table or a cabinet format for two or more players.

If you'd like to print out a cabinet yourself or design your own using my model, feel free to download using the files provided below!