This project is a fully functional bar-top style arcade made entirely from materials found in the trash (exceptions: solder, glue, and some of the hardware). The idea was born when I stumbled upon a water-logged arcade cabinet on the side of the road and I thought back to the DDR/House of the Dead dual game cabinet I built as a teenager.
Using my trusty leatherman I was able to remove the controls panel and carry this home - I considered this likely to be the most difficult to find component group. The “cabinet” is made from a found sheet of acrylic and has the ability to be used in either stand-alone mode (plug into HDMI display device, games on internal Raspberry Pi) or as an external USB controller for another device. Mode can be selected via buttons on the back of the cabinet (electrically controlled by a modified RCA switch). Because of the self-imposed limitation of using only found materials destined for the landfill, this project took around a year to complete - much of this was spent waiting to find ideal candidates for parts. This project was intended to be a functional art piece, demonstrating the amount of still usable and potentially valuable electronic waste ends up in the garbage and was to be showcased at a (cancelled) e-waste summit but now instead resides in my living room.
