Back to: Arcade1Up Costco Super Pac-Man mod
Back to: 3. Add Holes for Extra Buttons
Jump to: 5. Configure Arcade Power/Volume Buttons
You can order a set of buttons and joysticks for quite cheap off the Internet. It should come with a USB controller so that you can hook it up to your Raspberry Pi. The buttons should be a straightforward swap with the old buttons. The joystick most likely will need some new holes drilled for the screw holes. I used a piece of the packing foam to place the joystick handle in the middle of the hole so I could line up the drill holes on the underside of the wood control board.
Make sure you don’t drill all the way through the board. Start with a small drill bit and go gradually bigger until the hole is wide enough for the screw.
Follow the instructions of your button set on how to connect the wires. As I mentioned in the disassembly section, I kept all the wires from the old buttons as they were a bit longer than the ones that came with the new set. As you can see in the picture, I have been using some of those old wires for the buttons that are the farthest away from the USB control board (the long white wires are the old ones; the black and red wires are the new ones – I put a set of each in the bottom left of the picture so you can see the difference). Just to be clear, in the picture I have wired up 2 buttons, the joystick, and the LEDs to all the buttons.
Your set of buttons may have an LED in them, which will require a different strand of wires to hook it up to the 5V connector of the USB board. While the polarity of the button wires don’t matter, they do matter for the LED connections, so make sure red goes into the positive and black into the negative. There should be instructions for this with your button kit.
At this point, don’t permanently attach the USB control board to the wood panel yet, until everything has been tested. The USB control board will be connected with a USB cable directly into the Raspberry Pi.
In the next section, we are going to Configure the Power and Volume Buttons so that we can use them properly via the Raspberry Pi.