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GameBoy Zero, but smaller!!

My attempt to get the smallest, simplest GameBoy style device, based on the pi Zero

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So the pi zero is cool, retro gaming is cool, im really not cool, but i thought 'what the hell!!'

Im not overly fond of 'rats nest' wires, and i have a bit of an obsession with making things as small as possible, so this is what i came up with.

tis just an ili9341 screen, a pi zero, 2 navi switches (5 way), and a battery (with charge/protect circuit)

using the notro's fbtft driver, tasanakorn's fbcp code to get the screen to display, and adafruit's retrogame code to work the buttons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDbjSgRWIe4

The eagle eyed among you might spot there is no 'boost' circuit!!!

The pi zero is actually quite tolerant, you dont actually need to feed it the full 5v to make it work. The main core of the pi runs on lower voltages, so the majority of it will happily run as low as 3v (i have heard it will run lower, but li-po protection kicks in before we get there), the only real need for the 5v on the pi is USB peripherals, which most will be ok with 3v too!!

Therefore the battery (4.2v-3v) is piped straight into the 5v line on the pi, cutting a boost circuit out of the mix, keeping the power usage below 250mah

  • 1 × 2.2" ili9341 - 14 pin simple and small screen if you can get hold of them!! seems easier to get the screen on a board, than getting the naked screen
  • 1 × Raspberry pi zero (or zero w) turns out the brains of the operation is actually one of the cheapest components
  • 1 × custom PCB - https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/sYgn53n6 little bit pricey, and you have to order 3 boards, but OSHpark boards are good!
  • 1 × TP4056 - charge/protect board just make sure you get the one with protection!!
  • 1 × COM-10860 - surface mount right angle swtich teeny tiny switch. ideally the board needs a cutout to make it easier to operate (in the future we will have a microprocessor for this)

View all 9 components

  • And the winner is....

    moosepr04/08/2017 at 20:06 3 comments

    So all the playing with batteries, and i had yet to test the actual battery i had intended in the first place. My first ever project was run from a 2500mah li-po, which yielded a 10 hour runtime, however was rather large.

    So i tried what i thought was a 400mah drone battery, which size wise is smaller than the 2xAA battery holder. These 'pouch' cells come in varoius shapes and sizes, and a bit of hunting can find something perfectly sized

    So i fired up the same pico-8 Dank Tombs demo which lets you ramp up the cpu load and let it run. Amazingly we managed to get to the 3 hour mark!!!! This was awesome for a 400mah battery, so i thought i had better check the capacity

    that is a trifle high for a 400mah cell. So i looked back at my ebay purchases and apparently it is supposed to be 650mah!! so it is way off!! some quick napkin math will tell us the draw of the pi

    527mah / 3 hours = 175.66666666666666666666666666666

    so lets call it a 176mah draw!! impressive!!

    Edit:

    so after reading the comment by DaveDarko i realize my glaring mistake!! I had not taken into account that my meter is calculating the power being fed into the circuit @ 5V rather than what the battery is probably receiving @ 4.2v

    if we therefore take the figures on the display to calculate the wattage the battery charging consumed

    5.15V * 0.527A = 2.70878 watts

    if we then divide this by the battery voltage, we should in theory get the actual amps the battery got. now if im honest, im unsure here. I would normally assume the battery voltage is 3.7V as this is generally the average number used for li-po batteries. this would give us

    2.70878 watts / 3.7V = 0.7321027027027027 or 732mah (thats high!!)

    my reservations are due to the fact that the battery actually gets fed 4.2v to get it charged (i know it is not quite that simple) so in theory we could plug 4.2v into our calculation

    2.70878 watts / 4.2V = 0.644947619047619 or 645mah (looks more like it!)


    so if we assume i am correct, and we are using the 4.2V in the calculations, then we have a different power consumption

    645mah / 3 hours = 215mah consumption. still pretty impressive really

  • further further further battery fun

    moosepr04/07/2017 at 10:16 0 comments

    So after some chatting with K.C. Lee (https://hackaday.io/KC) on my last project log, I thought i would give the NiMH batteries a test. I knew that NiMH batteries didnt like being drawn totally flat, so i did some research and found that 0.9v was considered empty, but 0.8v was the safe minimum

    I had my multimeter on the cells to keep an eye on the voltage, and the timer just tipped over the 4:15 mark when the cells were reading 1.6v. once the voltage had dropped below 2v, it started dropping pretty quick!!

    So NiMH > alkaline, but it needs watching so you dont destroy the cells!!

  • Further Battery Fun

    moosepr04/06/2017 at 10:55 7 comments

    So i thought, 'hmm alkaline cells are like 2000mah, maybe i could use them here....'

    well the first problem is the voltage. 2xAA cells give you 3v, the pi can run as low as 2.7v, so we could use that!!

    So i wired it up, and it worked... for all of 15 minutes... it seems that alkaline batteries drop voltage very fast. we need to boost that voltage!!

    So i raided the parts bin, and i found an adjustable buck/boost board, gave that a go

    didnt even make the start!! seems the boost board wont work below 3v

    so plan C, over to pololu and one of there boost boards boosty which can take an input as low a 0.5v and boost it up so we looked like we were onto a winner

    So testing began, and i was expecting big things, 2000mah should technically yield 8 hours, but after just 3 hours, the pi started rebooting. seems that boosing the voltage isnt as simple as it seems!! to get 3.3v @ 200ma on the output, the input needs more current. so as the voltage drops, the current requirements raise.

    vin current (ma)
    3 220
    2.75 240
    2.5 264
    2.25 293
    2 330
    1.75 377
    1.5 440
    1.25 528
    1 660
    0.75 880
    0.5 1320

    so as we can see here, things will quickly snowball. as the voltage drops, the current raises, which will force the voltage lower, and the current higher, and so on, until the batteries just give up.

    So using lithium batteries is a much better prospect, as the voltage in general is higher, and there is no need for boosting!

  • Low power, low sucess!!

    moosepr03/22/2017 at 11:02 0 comments

    I had this crazy idea that if my tiny gbz only sips the power, it could maybe run from coin cells!

    Turns out they don't like 200ma draw and the voltage sags ALOT!!! But hey it was a fun idea!


  • testing the power

    moosepr03/15/2017 at 20:36 0 comments

    i have had a little bit more of a play with the power meter. using the 'dank tombs' http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28785 tech demo in pico-8 let me easily adjust the CPU load so i could get a better feel for the range of power usage, and it seems pretty consistant (crappy phone shot alert)

    on full blast (140% cpu ?!?!?)


    and wind down the torch to limit the cpu


    i also did a little test (no free hands for photo) using normal 'battery' voltage, and actually the current draw is higher!! with the power sat @ 4v, my multimeter peaked at about 250mah which is the same as i got from my old project, so it figures really!! also my super accurate usb power gauge seems to be about 10% low, although that was @ 4v, so maybe it is not calibrated for that

  • Piezo and Pico-8

    moosepr03/13/2017 at 10:23 0 comments

    So my testing with Piezo transducers seemed promising, although size wise they were a bit large for the project

    So i did a bit of hunting and found some SMT sized transducers that could be squeezed onto the board in a future design

    I cranked up the pi, added the necessary command into the config.txt (dtoverlay=pwm,pin=18,func=2), set the 3.5mm as the audio out, and cranked it up to full volume in alsamixer, and we have sound!!!!! very very quiet and tinny sound!! but hey, its never going to be used for the sound system at a party, or replacing your TV.

    While i was playing, i thought i would give Pico-8 some love!! fresh install of Raspian lite, screen and button code installed, and Pico-8 dropped onto the card, and we are in 8 bit heaven!!!

    The screen is actually too big for pico-8 (pixel wise) but the little nav switches actually work quite well, you get used to their quirks!!

  • Wired for sound

    moosepr03/07/2017 at 11:06 0 comments

    I have been looking at my options for adding sound to the device, without adding bulk, and i can of course pipe the pwm audio to the gpio, and then add in the handful of components to add the audio filter. This will then need a little bit of an amp, and a speaker, so we are suddenly racking up the component count.

    I was rummaging though my parts bin, and came across some old piezo transducers that were once inside musical greetings cards. as they are designed to be as loud and annoying as possible from a tiny battery, i thought i might be on to a winner.

    So i added the necessary into the /boot/config.txt (dtoverlay=pwm-2chan,pin=18,func=2,pin2=13,func2=4), forced the audio out of the 3.5mm socket inside the raspi-config, and cranked it up to 11 in alsamixer, and jabbed the wires into the relevant pin sockets, and we got sound!! sure it is a bit scratchy, and not overly loud (i think that is a bonus), but we have sound by adding just 1 more component!!

    I need to do more testing to see how it copes with no audio filtering in there, but i think the low fidelity nature of the piezo transducer actually plays into my hands here!! To be continued.......

  • lil bit of polish

    moosepr03/04/2017 at 21:33 2 comments

    So the original board works, but its not quite usable. The switch actually disconnects the power from the protection board, so tuning it off actually triggers the protection, and you need to plug the charger in to get it to reset.

    also this means that it has to be on to charge!!

    So i have fixed that, made holes in all 4 corners so its easier to mount in a case.

    if anyone wants to play with the board i have stuck it on OSHpark

    https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/sYgn53n6

View all 8 project logs

  • 1
    Step 1

    Getting the screen working in retropie

    using raspi-config, enable spi, enale ssh, disable overscan

    in /etc/modules, add

    spi-bcm2835
    fbtft_device

    in /etc/modprobe.d/fbtft.conf add

    options fbtft_device name=fb_ili9341 gpios=reset:25,dc:24 speed=80000000 bgr=1 rotate=90 custom=1fps=60

    reboot and its all done!

  • 2
    Step 2

    The screen by default wont actually run retropie on its own. So we need to run some code which copies the current screen into the tft. we need to download and install the code

    sudo apt-get install cmake
    git clone https://github.com/tasanakorn/rpi-fbcp
    cd rpi-fbcp/
    mkdir build
    cd build/
    cmake ..
    make
    sudo install fbcp /usr/local/bin/fbcp

    now we just need to add into /etc/rc.local (just make sure its before the exit)

    fbcp&

    now when you reboot, you will have a screen working!

View all instructions

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Discussions

fabian wrote 04/14/2018 at 17:30 point

is possible to add lora communication mesh and create opensource go tenna machine?

for emergencycommunications

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moosepr wrote 04/15/2018 at 08:54 point

Errrm there is plenty of gpio available, and the usb too. You could add whatever you need

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nidz wrote 06/08/2017 at 12:53 point

Hi there.. I saw your details about connecting the LIPO directly to the pi.. Can you tell me a few things.. Can you run the pi at the same time as charging the battery with the TP4056 module? Can you please provide a logic wiring diagram so I can have a look. Thanks.  I'm going to take your project and try and kind of make a MintyPi2 type arrangement. I didn't want to buy a powerboost module due to keeping cost down. If the TP4056 works then i'll just use that. Cheers.

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Rich wrote 05/13/2017 at 20:25 point

Hi, I'm still pretty new to the whole Pi world and wanted a relatively easy project to try. I've managed to source all of the parts for this build, but not sure how to connect the i9341 screen to your board. 

It would be great if you could do an assembly video for relative noobs like me.

Thanks in advance.

Rich

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Marq Watkin wrote 03/19/2017 at 13:15 point

Nice project, got me considering trying to put a pi zero in an after-market GBA case.

Also considering that charge/protect board with a zero for a custom MP3 player

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vcazan wrote 03/13/2017 at 17:38 point

Hello, can you provide source for pcb  as I want to generate gerbers to fab somewhere else. Thanks

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moosepr wrote 03/13/2017 at 18:55 point

Hi man you can find the eagle files on my github https://github.com/moosepr/GBz

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vcazan wrote 03/13/2017 at 18:58 point

Amazing Thanks!

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oshpark wrote 03/07/2017 at 17:34 point

Well done! 

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moosepr wrote 03/07/2017 at 21:15 point

thanks, but I couldn't have done it without your work making the boards! 😀

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alex.king35h wrote 03/06/2017 at 12:44 point

Nice project, looks great! :-) What's the resolution for the ili9341 screen? Most that I've seen are 320x240, which I didn't think would scale well for the Gameboy's 160x144 screen?

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moosepr wrote 03/06/2017 at 17:22 point

you are correct, it is 320x240. I have left the pi to do whatever it wants on the resolution front. even if its 1080p on the pi, the fbcp seems to cope when its thrown at the tft, and it doesnt seem to impact speed (just readability sometimes)

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Koen van Vliet wrote 03/04/2017 at 13:53 point

Nice use of those little directional switches. Are you planning on making an enclosure for it as well? It'd be nice to have this on a keychain.

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moosepr wrote 03/04/2017 at 16:26 point

I might leave the case until I have finished revising the board. The buttons take a bit of getting used to. Might need some tops on them

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j0z0r pwn4tr0n wrote 03/03/2017 at 19:35 point

Very cool. I have most of the components, might try to replicate this

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moosepr wrote 03/03/2017 at 20:50 point

Do it! 😀

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davedarko wrote 03/03/2017 at 13:47 point

yeah, nice job! 

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moosepr wrote 03/03/2017 at 15:13 point

thanks man :)

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