I've posted a few photos of this on the discord as I worked on it but figured I should post it here now its done!
I decided to tackle this project to keep me entertained in my downtime whilst working on the retrolite and to help me progress with my PCB design skills. I designed most of the case 2 years ago as I was intending for this to be my first handheld project, but I never got to finish it as I was unable to find what I thought would be a suitable screen at the time. Specs are as follows:
The machined acrylic housing was bead blasted and then painted with a coat of Tamiya clear on both the inside and the outside to try and remove as many imperfections as possible to get the finish as close to the original as I could. Asside from this, no other post processing was performed on the case (sanding etc) the finish here is basically what came off the machine. I'm sure a coat of colour transparent tamiya paint could also be used to add colour, but I am quite fond of the clear acrylic on this one.
I may upgrade to a Pi Compute Module 3 at some point in the future as the pi zero really is lacking a bit in performance. The issue is much more apparent when trying to drive an SPI screen at high speed as it appears to slow the pi zero down a bit more than I expected. I get nice smooth frame rates on gameboy games thanks to the fbcp-ili9341 LCD driver but on some gameboy colour games (especially when the whole screen has to refresh, i.e walking around in Pokemon) the frame rate noticeably drops. Its not unplayable, but it's defintiely enough to be annoying. Either that or I will try and track down a 2.8" LCD that I can drive directly with the Pi, as that should free up enough resources to get things moving smoothly again.
I'll probably open source this one eventually, but I might need to make a version of the housing that is more easily printable as the curved front combined with the very thin gap between the screen and the screen protector would be quite a challenge for most FDM printers.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
I decided to tackle this project to keep me entertained in my downtime whilst working on the retrolite and to help me progress with my PCB design skills. I designed most of the case 2 years ago as I was intending for this to be my first handheld project, but I never got to finish it as I was unable to find what I thought would be a suitable screen at the time. Specs are as follows:
- 2.8" 320x240 SPI IPS LCD (with about 35 pixels of width hidden by the bezel to get the correct aspect ratio)
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- AIO PCB with charge/boost, audio amp (max98357a) and an atmega328p for control input and various other functions
- 3000mah 3.7v battery (providing theoretically 5-6 hours of run time, I will do a full run-down test soon)
- Mono speaker
- CNC machined Acrylic housing that cloesly resembles a gameboy pocket (slightly thinner overall and removed all unused holes)
- Clicky tactile switches with custom silicone membranes
The machined acrylic housing was bead blasted and then painted with a coat of Tamiya clear on both the inside and the outside to try and remove as many imperfections as possible to get the finish as close to the original as I could. Asside from this, no other post processing was performed on the case (sanding etc) the finish here is basically what came off the machine. I'm sure a coat of colour transparent tamiya paint could also be used to add colour, but I am quite fond of the clear acrylic on this one.
I may upgrade to a Pi Compute Module 3 at some point in the future as the pi zero really is lacking a bit in performance. The issue is much more apparent when trying to drive an SPI screen at high speed as it appears to slow the pi zero down a bit more than I expected. I get nice smooth frame rates on gameboy games thanks to the fbcp-ili9341 LCD driver but on some gameboy colour games (especially when the whole screen has to refresh, i.e walking around in Pokemon) the frame rate noticeably drops. Its not unplayable, but it's defintiely enough to be annoying. Either that or I will try and track down a 2.8" LCD that I can drive directly with the Pi, as that should free up enough resources to get things moving smoothly again.
I'll probably open source this one eventually, but I might need to make a version of the housing that is more easily printable as the curved front combined with the very thin gap between the screen and the screen protector would be quite a challenge for most FDM printers.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
