With the Rpi screwed onto the back door of the Picade, it’s necessary to unscrew it to remove the microsd card.
Admittedly this isn’t something I do every day, but I do occasionally like to take a backup image of the card before messing about with settings/upgrading RetroPie etc.
I’ve ordered one of these extenders to allow the Rpi to be left securely screwed to the door while the sd card can be removed/replaced for backup.
Honestly I could not recomment the use of such cable.
You may get lucky and have no issues, but on the other hands you may get a lot of reliability issue, that add a notable length to the SD bus, this sort of flex are good to add all sort of noise, and other issues on these digital lines.
What may happen from nothing if you really are lucky, to SD speed reduction, to data corruption and in the worst case, nothing is working. So be careful with such a thing.
I take my Picade along to the local computer club, as well as letting visitors use it from time to time.
Once of the things I’ve noticed they do it press all the buttons to try to find the correct one to exit a game. Quite often they will try the volume buttons on the left hand side a few times, which cranks up the volume to the point where the screen blanks out due to power issues - they then think they’ve broken the picade!
Ideally some sort of limit on the amp would be good, so that it can’t have the volume increased so high that there are power issues. However my idea for an improvement mod is to just move those volume buttons to the rear of the picade, maybe even to the back door - as in normal use, there isn’t much need to be constantly changing the volume settings ( my larger bartop cab doesn’t have any hardware volume controls at all, it’s all software).
Anyway, my plan is to use these blanking panels to blank off the holes where the volume buttons were:
Then drill a couple of holes at the rear of the case for these smaller volume buttons:
Hopefully this will avoid the problem of inadvertent volume-related screen cut-outs.
Ah. That would also work, and would involve a lot less drilling, yes!
My OCD wouldn’t like pushable buttons that no longer did anything though, and although I do have a little wireless keyboard inside, I kind of like the idea that the volume is still adjustable from the outside of the cab, just not by accident.
Maybe I should take a look at updating the firmware anyway though, you’re right.
Any way of using the mapped buttons on the left side AND having direct volume controls on the top/rear via other buttons? I don’t remember if there were any additional inputs on the Picade board or not.
But in the meantime, I just bought a nylon spacer kit to raise the Pi up enough so I can grab the card.
I’m going to move the Pi from the door to the bottom soon and was thinking of mounting longways and cutting out a notch like the Picade Console has, but I may just stick with the spacers as they allow for better airflow.