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How it's built

A project log for Xts-GamingSystem

Yet another handheld (the 4th...) but this time it runs Linux with natives & Lua softwares

franck-galliatFranck GALLIAT 12/14/2018 at 17:090 Comments

 - The Pad

The PCB was cutted then re-wired to keep original dir.-cross & btns

I found a tutorial here to perform that.

Then all buttons + GGear led were wired to a GPIO expander (SX1509 from SparkFun) that is readed by an Arduino ProMini 3.3v (8Mhz) because I had a lot of troubles by connecting it directly to the ARM SoC.

 - The SoC

It's an AriettaG25 ARM SoC (not a raspPI one...).

It has 128MB of RAM, 400MHz cpu, SD slot & pluggable WiFi module.

no sound output, no HDMI output, so Why ?

Because is more even tiny than the RPI-0, it has 3 USB host ports, you can change the GPIO header layout. (& I've got 3 of those left in my toolbox...)

The Sound Interface

I had 2 options :

 - plug an USB SoundCard (but needed to rebuild a full kernel w/ good sound modules since the model that I have is not reconized )

 - wire a DFPlayer Mini (Serial MP3 playback module that I already used in my previous console projects)

I choose the DFPlayer, it does require less POWER & requires no CPU resources... (& it's cheap !)

I finally plugged it onto the Arduino too to keep my others TTL lines free.

 - The Screen

2 reasons to choose ILI9341 :

 - I already used it in my projects

 - there's an SD image file already built w/ Debian Jessie for the Arietta

It's SPI connecting, has 320x240px 64k colors 

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