For Father’s Day (we live in London, so we celebrate it today, unlike in Spain which is March 19) my wife gave me the “Ultimate Father`s Day” gift, from TechCamp UK. [Thank you, love!]

It consisted of a workshop with other father-son / father-daughter “teams”, held at the Iron Yard (The Leathermarket – London), where we built a desktop arcade machine in 5 hours (including lunch break), following the directions from Tom and Tom, using the Picade set, setting up and using the Raspberry Pi, custom OS, emulators, ROMs, loudspeakers, power supply, LCD screen, etc:

Not only we had a lot of fun and bonded through the “hard” work (especially getting all those nuts and bolts and cables in their little places!) of putting together the mini arcade machine, but my son also learned a few very valuable lessons, like being patient, not being shy, following directions carefully, and the main one, overcoming adversity: our board had a loose connector, which had to be soldered, and when we finished setting up the arcade… the screen was upside down! It took some thinking and engineering to get it straight up.

To top it all off, we got to take the arcade home, so now, if you will excuse me, I NEED TO install the Super Mario Bros. ROM and mash some buttons old style 😉