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I made another wee thing at the weekend.
its a "mini arcade cabinet marquee" styled lamp.
its is controlled by 3 toggle switches that turn on / off the RGB components of the LEDS in it.
the end panels are held in place with magnets so they can be taken off and the front game panel can be removed and swapped out for another game.
its all powered off a standard usb cable.
A collage of four nighttime shots showing the mini arcade cabinet marquee lamp lit up in different colors — white, red, blue, and green. Each lighting mode creates a unique retro glow, highlighting the "Asteroids" game panel.
the second image is a slightly different earlier version showing the outrun panel instead of the asteroids.
theres light leak at the edge of the front panel so might put a defuser over LEDs to help that, maybe line the inside panels with some reflective foil to prevent all the light leaking through the top bottom and side panels.
I have a few other components laying around and was thinking of doing one with a ESP32 in it and controlling lights using WLED.
another idea is to switch out the toggle switches for rotary potentiometers and give more control on RGB values rather than simply on off.
I have several protoypes of the design laying around. mostly panels of various designs I wanted to test. So i could probalby make a few of these.
I even have an end panel thats got a cavity and cover to embed a #rasperipi zero W. so the entire mini marquee becomes a retro gaming mini cab of sorts when plugged into a monitor and using a wireless gamepad. I toyed with putting RFID chips into the back of the front panel to "load" the games into the Pi, but never did. but the gaming version worked.
@gerrykelly love it.
Where do you source your signs?
https://www.thebottlefarm.com/wpbottle/did-it-arcade-marque-lightbox/
I made one from a sign I got at a yard sale eons ago.
@m750 they are printed from vector art from online sources I found many many years ago (arcadeartwork.org), or from art I've took from scans and then converted manually to vectors. I printed them on an off white (cream almost) vinyl material to help mimic older bulbs when using leds and laminated it to cut to size clear self adhesive acrylic sheet.
probably I would reverse print them directly onto clear panels using a UV ink printer I have access to, if i was doing them again now.
@gerrykelly that is cool. I wouldn't know the first place to start to print my own, I've considered buying more because asteroids is cool, but I loved hard driving, and want to make one as a gift
@m750 theres a lot of companies that make reproduction panels for peopel restoring arcade machines, you could start there this link https://www.gallopingghostreproductions.com/shop/hard-drivin I think is us based, and will supply a hard driving marquee mounted on clear acrylic. (btw, just one of the first links I found online, could not say if site is legit to order form or not)
you could also try just getting some high quality graphics and a local printer should be able to knock it out on vinyl or other material that you want.
:)