Picade build help please

Was expecting a few more of these on here…
but …
I spent 5 hours yesterday building my new picade and managed to plug it in and press the power button, but nothing happened, not light or anything…
im sure im not the first, so what is the best thing to do to reverse engineer to find the problem…
Cheers in advance.!!

Some things to check:

  • HAT pushed down firmly onto Pi GPIO header
  • Power plugged in via HAT
  • SD card in snugly and flashed with the right version of RetroPie?
  • Does the onboard power switch work

Cheers for the reply.!
Ill try these when i get in from work…
Ive not done the sd card yet as it got too late …
But where abouts is the onboard power button.!?
I just wanted to see the power light come on and it didnt, should the screen come on aswell without the sd card.!?

Im not one to complain either, but my Picade didnt come with a hdmi cable and was told theres a 3 week wait but was despatched 2 days later, i hope i wasnt thrown a dud…!

I don’t think anything much will happen without an SD card- since the Pi wont output an HDMI signal the screen most likely wont initialise unless you manually press ON. You’ll have to prep the SD card to continue!

Lack of an HDMI cable is a shame :( sorry about that, you have every right to complain! Most probably we sent you a good one we had on reserve somewhere- since the shop is in a different building, they’ll sometimes send someone over to us to grab things.

Once you’ve flashed the SD card, don’t forget to edit the “config.txt” file on the visible partition and add “hdmi_force_hotplug=1” - seems we left this out of our instructions. D’oh!