Building a couple Pocket Pigrrl RetroPi 3D Printed Gaming Handhelds
I am building two customized Pocket Pigrrl’s for my daughter and niece. As a kid the NES system was mine, but my younger sister owned the original gameboy which I constantly stole from her on car trips so it seemed right that both our kids have little portable gameboy like devices. I am also hoping that this device will help keep mommy’s phone away from the children.
I started out by cutting down the half sized perma proto board and laying out the buttons for a 4 button pigrrl. I used my dremel to cut down the perma proto boards and then attached the 6mm tactile buttons onto the cut down proto board. Then I layed out the Raspberry Pi A+, PowerBoost 1000C and Audio Amp boards inside the case and started cutting some wire.
Next I wired up the switch and applied the heatshrink tubing, then I attached the wires to the audio jack of the raspberry pi and connected them to the PowerBoost.
I made a table of all the GPIO inputs on the Pi, and where they map to in the Pocket Pigrrl project:
Wire # Pin Key Connect to 1 GPIO 3V N/A Unused 2 GPIO 5V N/A PowerBoost 3 GPIO 2 Key X Perma Proto Controller 4 GPIO GND N/A Unused 5 GPIO 3 Key Y Perma Proto Controller 6 GND N/A PowerBoost 7 GPIO 4 Key Left Perma Proto Controller 8 GPIO 14 N/A Unused 9 GND N/A Perma Proto Controller 10 GPIO 15 N/A Unused 11 GPIO 17 Key Right Perma Proto Controller 12 GPIO 18 Key Up Perma Proto Controller 13 GPIO 27 Key Down Perma Proto Controller 14 GPIO GND N/A Unused 15 GPIO 22 Key A Perma Proto Controller 16 GPIO 23 Key B Perma Proto Controller 17 GPIO 3V N/A Unused 18 GPIO 24 N/A Unused 19 GPIO 10 N/A Unused 20 GPIO GND N/A Unused 21 GPIO 9 N/A Unused 22 GPIO 25 N/A Unused 23 GPIO 10 N/A Unused 24 GPIO 8 N/A Unused 25 GPIO GND N/A Unused 26 GPIO 7 N/A Unused
I soldered all of the ground wires for the controller and clipped the unnecessary wires from the Pi GPIO cable.
The last step was to solder all of the controller buttons to the perma proto board and test that everything was working properly.
I downloaded the Adafruit RetroPi image and everything fired right up. I found that the up button was turning off the screen, so I cut the GPIO18 backlight trace on the back of both screens and the system is working properly, now it is time to load some ROMS!
Originally published at garthvh.com on November 18, 2015.
