I had hours of fun putting this little arcade game together and learned that sometimes perseverance is key to success. I had the whole project built and turned it on and...nothing. I had tested it before and the screen worked as planned, but not now when I was so excited to try it out.
So I emailed for tech support.
A couple of days later Jack greeted me in an email and wanted me to send a photo of the motherboard. So I took everything apart, took the photo, and then enlarged it. I immediately saw what I did wrong! Not enough solder on the pins by a longshot. I took the time to add some more and now it works!
I'm super happy with this project and highly recommend it.

My son had trouble with the screen working, so he sent an email. He got a response within 24 hours (and on a Sunday!), with a follow-up Zoom call. The gentleman was on the Zoom call for over an hour with my son walking him through each step. He was extremely patient and very kind.

I will be telling all of my mom friends about this kit; it's worth every penny.

This is an amazing arcade at an excellent price! The build process is extremely smooth with excellent tutorials that tell you exactly what to do.
Not only can you take advantage of a ton of games you can find and upload to your MicroCade, you can actually create your own games, taking the learning experience to a whole new level.
Best of all, the support behind the MicroCade is phenomenal, with the Arduboy community always ready to help out and create new ideas and Jack Daly being 100% committed to customer satisfaction.

I saw this kit mentioned by a Twitter follower and it was a no brainer of a buy - it took about a week to arrive in Australia and this weekend my 7 year old set out to build it.

Firstly the instructions are all on a series of videos - these are very clear and high quality explaining clearly what to do at every step

The first thing to do was lay out all the parts and connect the soldering iron (included in the kit) to a usb power bank (the only thing not included that you need) and wait for it to heat up - this led to important lessons on how to properly hold the hot iron, how to put it down safely, and then how to solder - the kit comes with a practice solder board and enough parts to solder 3 rows of connectors (the 4th is used as a temp spacer later on)

My daughter seemed yo pick this up really quickly and we then moved on to soldering the components to the motherboard, connecting the control board and plugging in the battery

The next stage was a bit trickier and needed a bit of my help to solder parts of the case in place while she held them together finally we had a completed arcade machine

She immediately started playing some of the games until the battery went out (it was bed time so good timing)

She had a blast making this and she is thinking of a game she wants to make in the programming side of the product

All in all a great product well put together with excellent instructions and room to explore programming

This little arcade machine was a joy to build and was very user friendly. This microcade has brilliant games and keep you entertained for hours. The soldering has taught me more and also was great practice of this skill also the instructions for this build were very detailed and great for following. This project was over all a great one and a good choice for a first project.