RetroPie Console 2

RetroPie Console 2 - Radio

This project was completed on October 12, 2019 by Mitchell Hollis and can also be viewed on Instagram.

After playing around with the last RetroPie Console, I wanted to make another one for myself. This time I started out with the empty shell of an old Crosley radio. My dad likes to fix old radios and had a number of these exteriors waiting for a good project.

Everything is held in place with a couple blocks of wood. One has the Raspberry Pi mounted with some motherboard standoffs.
The second blocks holds a couple pieces of acrylic. The front most acrylic sheet has some sparkly gold fabric spray glued to it. This looks like grill cloth from the front of the radio. The second sheet of acrylic is spaced back about an inch and has a few adhesive LED strips. The strips are connected to the 5v pin on the Raspberry Pi, so the light up with it powers on.

Since both of the knobs were missing, I made a couple fake knobs out of chechen wood. For the left knob I riveted a piece of sheet metal so that I could mount a momentary push button, to turn the console on and off. For the right knob, I mounted a short USB cable, so that I could add roms to the console without pulling it out and accessing the back.

I made an indicator needle out of wood and brass to go on the front. It doesn't move, but it looks very fancy and that's really what's important.

I touched up the numbers and Crosley name with some gold paint and was good to go. I got Bluetooth working with this one so that I could use a wireless controller.
I've ended up making several of these, each with different enclosures.

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