I just bought a Surface Pro 7 to replace my 2. The 2 still works great and I have never had any problems with it. I am trying to think of ways to repurpose the 2. I have some ideas but some of them would require physical modifications. Does anyone have any idea how the power button could be wired to a button that sits a foot or two away from the Surface? I can do this quite easily with a desktop PC but I am not sure what I am going to see if pull the power button off of this Surface Pro 2, and unlike with a desktop, I cannot just open this up easily and take a look at what I am dealing with before I start breaking things.
Repurposing a Pro 2
- Thread starter mmcbride
- Start date
It will not be plugged in 100% of the time and my purpose will call for the entire unit to be inaccessible. The ideal solution would be to set up an arcade style button that could be pressed to power it on or off. That is what I have done with the desktops I have used for similar projects.
EDIT: the final product will be a variation of something like this:
EDIT: the final product will be a variation of something like this:
I have considered the mechanical button option. It certainly could work, and is an option I am keeping open. But to do it the way I really want, it would be a led convex arcade button on the control panel and when it is pressed, the Surface will boot directly into the game library, not in to the desktop. I have a full sized stand up arcade cabinet running a similar setup on a refurbished HP Pavillion Desktop. I want to mirror the setup on this little thing with a much smaller game library - my full size machine has trackballs, 4 player joysticks, and all sorts of bells and whistles that won't fit on this set up and will limit the games. I just want a handful of 80s games that use a 4 way joystick and no more than 3 buttons (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Asteroids, etc.). 90% of the cost of making such a thing is in the CPU and monitor. The Surface Pro 2 fills both of those rolls and is free to me at this point.
