Question Best way to start designing

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I would like to learn how to design my own ps2 portable. I do not have too good of an understanding of how and why a trimmed motherboard works or what materials I will need. Can anyone help?
 
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I'd say look definetly look through the forums and see what other people did. For me I bought sandpaper to sand down the sides of the cut board, a dremel to do said cutting, some 34AWG magnet wires , 22 and 18AWG wires.;Those are just examples and I'm still looking through the forums myself lol.
 

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Fusion 360 is the best free CAD software currently, and has a metric shitton of tutorials on youtube and skillshare to get you started on modelling.

The PS2 trimming guide linked above has dimensions listed for each trim type, which you can use to create a basic shape to get an idea of the amount of internal space you'll need in the design phase. For finer details you'll need to take your own measurements of the position and height of components like electrolytic capacitors and the big chips. Li-ion cells are pretty easy to model, as their designations are their external measurements. IE: An 18650 cell is a cylinder 65mm long with an 18mm diameter, and a 21700 cell is 70mm long with a 21mm diameter (ignore the last 0 in both). For controls and mounting, you're mostly on your own. You can study open source case designs like the G-Wii and Louii to see how other people have organised things like control mounting, the screen hole, and li-ion cell holders to get an idea of how you could set up yours. You could even modify the existing G-Wii case model to fit PS2 parts and save yourself the time designing an entire case from the ground up.

If you're just doing the standard trim, you can feed 7.4v straight from a 2S li-ion cell arrangement to the 8.5v line and run a single wire from the onboard 5v reg to the audio amp to repair a trace that's severed during trimming. You don't need any custom regs unless you're going for the advanced trim, which I don't recommend.

Aside from that, you'll need the basic tools and general materials listed above. Plus a latching power switch, 7.4v li-ion protection PCB, 7.4v smart charger, a DC barrel jack to fit that charger, buttons and sticks from a PS2 controller (preferably a good quality OEM controller), probably one of those little Chinese PS2 controller replacement boards, a TFT screen and driver board, an audio amp plus speakers (the U-Amp from 4layertech.com works with the PS2 natively), and a lot of time and patience.
 
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