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Wix Engineering developer Yonatan Mevorach has turned a toy arcade machine into one thing a bit of better-suited to his present work-from-home way of life: a Raspberry Pi-powered Grafana dashboard.
“It occurred to me that [the arcade toy’s] small display might be good for presenting graphs, and that I might even use the bodily buttons to navigate by means of them,” Mevorach explains of his inspiration, triggered by lacking a devoted metric-tracking second monitor used within the workplace. “Fortunately, regardless of having no thought how an arcade machine works, I managed to switch it to show graphs from Grafana.”
The idea for the construct is a miniature arcade cupboard, obtained in a Wix Engineering swag bag however merely gathering mud. Inside was a controller board, joystick and button panel, speaker, display, and battery compartment — and sufficient area to suit a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board laptop.
“I might attempt to re-use the unique display however I must study to reverse-engineer tips on how to management it,” Mevorach explains, “so I made a decision to do away with it and attempt to discover a display with the identical form-factor that is designed to be managed by a Raspberry Pi. This meant that apart from the plastic exterior, the one unique half I would wish to re-utilize are the bodily buttons and the circuit-board that controls them.”
With the management board wired to the Raspberry Pi’s general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header, and the batteries changed by an appropriate micro-USB energy provide, Mevorach’s arcade machine grew to become rather a lot much less enjoyable however significantly extra helpful. A alternative 2.4″ show slots into the unique housing and provides a take a look at Grafana dashboards, whereas the controls flick by means of the potential metrics on show — all up to date dwell over the Raspberry Pi Zero W’s Wi-Fi connection.
“Don’t be concerned should you’ve by no means tinkered with electronics or used a soldering-iron earlier than,” Mevorach notes. “I did not both earlier than beginning this challenge.”
The total construct log is out there on Mevorach’s web site.
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