pboland's Blog - Control Panel Time! (Robotron 2084)

RSS Bot · May 30, 2019

Building the control panel was a little tricky as I never really found good cad drawings of the panel. I did find this post on KLOV:

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/sho...19&postcount=3

With that info in hand, I set out to make my control panel. The control panel shown here is actually my second attempt at making this panel. The first one was off just enough that I couldn’t get my paper based control panel overlay to wrap nicely around all three sides. I kept getting a buckle in the middle of the overlay. If it was vinyl it wouldn’t have been an issue as vinyl “gives” a little. Paper does not (especially vinyl coated paper).

So with my second attempt I decided to 3D print parts (that I first had to design) of the build to help keep things a little more true.

I printed the 3d parts over the course of a week. I used two part epoxy to adhere the 3d parts and wood (1/2" particle board) to the 3d printed frame.

At this point I put a slightly modified CPO on the panel. This new CPO does not wrap all the way around the bottom do to the paper buckling problem. Again, remember this will not be on location and only in my home. I decided to reenforce the top and bottom edges with tacks. Those bottom tacks will only be visible if people decide to look under the control panel. I don’t have a pic of just the panel with the CPO but I do have some of the assembly of the controls. BTW, that is the wiring after a little time cleaning it up. Just a reminder that these panels use a very standard USB control board, so this controller terminates to a standard USB cable (lower left hand side of the two bottom pics).

And finally the finished control panel:

Yes, I know that the black joystick washers are not on top of a real Robotron panel. I did it this way to simplify the build and to keep costs down.

More to come…