#diy

The Game Boy Camera was brilliant and stupid in equal measure, a 128x112 pixel sensor bolted on top of a cartridge, printing to thermal paper on a Game Boy Printer the size of a brick. I got both for Christmas when I was 12 and somehow spent hours with them. The minigames are absurd, the image quality is aggressively awful, and the whole thing looks like a prop from a cheap sci-fi film. I loved it.

The GPi Case is a fancy case for the Raspberry Pi Zero that gives you a screen, speaker, buttons and battery in a design reminiscent of the original DMG-001 Classic Game Boy. I’ve got mine set up to emulate some old game consoles. It’s great. As the GPi Case uses a Raspberry Pi at its core, you can use it to run more than just game emulators. The Raspberry Pi plays Pico-8 games wonderfully (Pico-8 officially supports Raspberry Pi as a platform, too!). I’d always wanted a dedicated Pico-8 console, so the GPi fits the bill perfectly. I bought a second GPi cartridge to make a dedicated Pico-8 cart for my GPi. It contains a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an 8GB Micro SD card with a stripped-down Retropie that boots straight to the Pico-8 splore menu so you can immediately find and launch Pico-8 games made by the community. I put these labels together using found assets and the Pico-8 logo. You can print them on paper and then just glue or tape them onto the cartridge case. Printed dimensions should be: Width: 39.5mm Height: 22.75mm

I helped crowdfund the DevTerm from ClockworkPi back in November 2020 and it arrived in January 2022. It’s a nice device, but it’s not perfect. Here’s some of the mods I’ve made to improve my DevTerm.

The Pocket CHIP doesn’t come with internal speakers. It has the GPIO pins for audio, but nothing is hooked up. On the CHIP itself there is a 3.5mm audio jack for connecting headphones, and you can pair a Bluetooth speaker. On the old NTC blog there was a post back in 2016 about adding an internal speaker using a fairly inexpensive PAM8403 amplifier and a speaker. You can find a mirror of the old post from the NTC blog on archive.org

I bought a ClockworkPi GameShell back in October 2019. I’ve been playing with it a bit lately (in anticipation of the ClockworkPi DevTerm shipping!) and I realised I haven’t yet posted anything about it on here. Here’s some of the hardware mods I’ve made to my GameShell.

I finally got around to assembling this little Peanut kit that I bought from Tindie a couple of months ago. The kit comes with everything you need (except a battery) to build a tiny (50 x 35mm) Arduboy-compatible handheld game. The specs are as follows: Arduino Pro Micro 0.96” OLED screen Piezo speaker The build instructions were very simple to follow, requiring only basic soldering skills (and a tiny SMD resistor to change out). Uploading games to the Peanut is pretty straight-forward. On Windows there are a couple of applications available. On Linux the process is a little more involved but it works great once you’ve got it set up. The only thing to note – in my experience – the ATTRS{idProduct} for the udev rules is slightly different with the Arduino Pro Micro provided in the Peanut kit, but you can easily find the correct value by checking the output of lsusb. There’s a bunch of games available on the Arduboy forum and also a nice curated list of games that can be automatically uploaded with the desktop app.

This is an overview of why and how I decided to automate part of my home, and build my first IoT device…

I’ve been playing with this Pocket Sprite a bit lately. It’s a tiny ESP32-based device that can emulate Gameboy, NES and various other classic game systems.

Well I took another look at the design of my macro keys project sooner than I expected. I started over with the design of the 3D-printed part of this project, and then moved the buttons and guts over from the previous version.

After my previous macro key project back in January that used full-size arcade buttons, I was itching to make a more compact set of macro keys.

I went back to the drawing board with the amp design, this time with the goal to make the layout more symmetrical and to move the AUX input to the back of the amp.

My wife and I like to have the radio playing all night in our bedroom. Our radio only has one mono speaker and it sits on one side of the bed which means for it to be audible on both sides of the bed one person has to have a loud speaker next to their pillow.

I wrote back in May about having a Raspberry Pi, and very few ideas about what to do with it. Here’s an update on the subject.

This probably isn’t a new idea, but i think i executed it nicely.. i had this 512mb sony usb stick, which was pretty scratched up, and i had lost the cap for it.. so i decided i’d put it inside some lego bricks.