EVERYBODY’S SCALIN’ – MOBILE GAMING TRUCK!
When you can merge two of your passions into one, the end results are fantastic. After all that is how I got into the scale side of RC, seeing that I could mix my Diorama builds into the world of scale RC I was hooked. Anthony Petrone A.K.A Ant team Driver for ScalerFab took his love for gaming and RC and ended up creating a work of art that everyone can enjoy. A mobile gaming truck that can play tons of games not to mention that the rig still drives and functions as it should. Just Another example of the insane amount of work and creativity it takes to try and win a USTE award. This is what Anthony Petrone had to say about his mobile gaming truck.
Anthony Petrone:
I have always wanted to combine two of my favorite hobbies together, retro gaming and custom RC trucks so I made it my mission this year to do that. I set out to build a mobile gaming truck like the ones you would find a children’s birthday parties or corporate events but past that I also wanted it to be interactive so people could actually play the games. The first thing I needed to do was make sure I could configure all of the systems to run off portable power as I didn’t want to have to plug the truck into an outlet to actually use it. I put together three systems in total, two retropie systems running on raspberry pies and on Atgames Legends Gamer pro. Since all of these devices ran on 5v I knew I would be able to power them from portable battery banks. Once I was able to source three screens that also ran on 5v I knew the build would work.
I picked the Tamiya 1850L as my starting point as I needed a scale truck with a large container space to house all the electronics I planned to use on the build. Once I had the kit in my hands, I realized that my original plan to use the pieces for the container that came with the kit wouldn’t work as the side pieces themselves were made out of aluminum and also had ridges built into them. I needed smooth flat surfaces for the sides pieces for my build to look right in my mind, so I had to build new pieces from scratch. I was able to source large pieces of 2mm thick styrene and using double sided tape I put the original pieces on the styrene and traced out the shapes. I carefully cut out new pieces and from there made the other cutouts needed for the screens.
I made a few modifications to the build past that such as housing all of the trucks rc components in the cab instead of having them on the bottom of the truck, I did this because I built a custom sound system using tiny speakers I found on amazon as well as tiny 5v amp I was able to hide in the truck so as to provide sound from the systems. I also installed a locked solid rear diff from Integy in the axle, and RC Hobbies in Orlando was awesome enough to supply me with some killer RC4WD Chaos wheels for the build.
The finished product is a fully interactive mobile gaming RC truck that houses 3 different arcade systems and allows up to 6 people to play some of their favorite games all at once. The two smaller systems on the passenger side each house 2000 games and the large screen on the driver side is setup for 2 player head-to-head fighting games including favorites like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. The whole system runs on 3 large portable power banks and has enough power for a few hours of run time before needed to be charged up again. I can’t wait to have this at USTE this year and watch as everyone steps up to play some of their favorite video games from their youth!
I am super excited to see it at USTE 2022 and get down on some Paper Boy or Excite Bike, thank you Anthony Petrone for sharing this amazing build with us. I think its safe to say we all look forward to what you can come up with next. Till next week, have a great weekend and keep scalin’!!
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