pboland's Blog

How much power can you sink from that 12V output? I've a few of those same monitors (rescued from work), but I don't know if that 12V or USB is beefy enough to power a RPi3.

I'm not really sure. I just know that it works with the set-up I show above.

 

I know my test rig uses a Pi2 and I'm powering it via the USB hub on the monitor with no problems, but I'm not using the 12 volt output from the monitor at the same time (meaning on my test rig).

 

I hope that helps.

I am fairly certain you can connect the arcade controls directly to the RPi GPIO headers and use the built-in audio jacks instead of the USB dongle.

I am fairly certain you can connect the arcade controls directly to the RPi GPIO headers and use the built-in audio jacks instead of the USB dongle.

Yes, you can do that. Keep in mind that I'm using a PI/zero which has no built in audio jacks. It is possible to get sound from the header but (needs to be set in the base code) it's noisy and support circuit is necessary for cleaner audio. It was much easier to just use the $0.99 usb audio dongle. As for the controls the USB interface is just easier to deal with as the GPIO header would need to be programed to and the USB device is pretty much plug and play and at $7.00 isn't that costly.