1Up Arcade Mod: Adding Speakers and Amplifier

The 1Up has a slat directly under the joystick panel on an angle. It is about 1/4" thick and its coated with some laminate and 460mm W by 180mm H. I measured out the speakers (80mm D), amplifier (100mm W 40mm H) and the old buttons from the PacMan (1" D about 28mm D). (Inspect the page if you want this template for your laser cutter. You will see a scale factor for mm to pt and the measurements are in mm. It's hand coded SVG.) I went to the maker room at work and cut the board. The laser had issue with the laminate, so we had to run it 3 times.

I like recycling, so I had an old Insignia NS-PCS40 pair of desktop speakers. I didn't find the speaker specifications, aside from it using a power adapter that output 12V and 700mA load. When we ripped the speakers appart (doh, screws behind the fabric), I found they were 4 Ohm 40 W. The amplifier I bought, the Kinter MA 170, would have no problem powering those...

So if you want an inexpensive set of speakers, you can try these

I debated using hot glue or expoxy. At least with hot glue, a heat gun can help fix a mistake. But expoxy is permanent, so I used hot glue.

The issue with the hot glue is it is not compressible. So I ended up with 1-2mm of gap between the speaker mount and the faceplate board. Here is the result

However, the final product was almost perfect. I just needed to use my dremmel to make notches for the arcade buttons. My plan for them is to connect them to the GPIO on the Odroid and use them for restart or shutdown. Almost - means that in hind sight I should lower the buttons by 3/4" because I miscalculated the USB hub position and height for when USB cables are plugged in! I was lucky in that I could position the cables around the button and still use the wiress network and keyboard adapters.

I added 1/2" angle brackets under the amplifier with hot glue to give it more stability. Again, hindsight tells me I should have raised the amplifier box by 1/4".