My order should arrive any day now. Once that happens and I start wiring up the buttons, I’ll post picks. If you look at the pHat Beat you’ll see numbers bedside the buttons. Those are the GPIO used by that button. All you have to do is wire your own switch up to those GPIO. Normally open momentary switches are what you want. That’s why I picked arcade buttons. Plus they work great for mounting in a wooden case. ;)
Getting a remote control to work is a bit trickier. Originally I wanted to use a wireless mini media keyboard, but couldn’t get any usable codes out of it. Use a media keyboard with your pHat Beat, can it be done?
I have a FLIRC, https://www.flirc.tv/ It can learn just about any IR remotes codes. As far as the Pi goes it thinks its a USB media keyboard. So I switched to that and tried a few different remotes. Some work better than others. My code works but it needs refinement. It glitches now and then and just stops working. That Pi is headless so I don’t know what happened? My plan is to add my code to the main py file so its all running from the one file. Haven’t found the ambition to actually do it yet though. I think i’ll have a go though once I get working on it again and have my buttons all wired up and uable, as backup.