DANGER! This post likely to be pic heavy!
[spoiler="Initial Post"]-=Initial Post=-
Anywho, I have a teeny tiny bit of PCB experience, and [mention]Helder[/mention] was gracious enough to drop EagleCAD files in one of this threads for his old board design.
A quick wash in Eagle to change some things to handle my fab's limitations and to make it 100% single-sided, and tada; The Mk1 board. Still has Helder's name on it too, I think I'll leave that there until I've sufficiently modified it.
Oh, did I mention my employer has a CNC Mill? And that I can use it for whatever I want after hours, so long as I provide the materials?
And through the magic of the internet, its done! That totally didn't take an hour, with my face pressed against the glass the whole time, no, not at all.
It looks pretty good I think.
But there's some .... unidentified residue on the inside of my ebay it-was-$15-because-it-didn't-work donor Gameboy. I think I found why it didn't work .... So uh, yea lets set that aside to be dremel bate to experiment with different layouts. In the mean time, I also got a clear aftermarket shell, and it looks kind nifty in there!
[/spoiler][spoiler="Update 2"]-=Update 2=-
I found that a user over on the chipmusic forums had long ago tried to reverse engineer the gameboy and make an eagle schematic, but gave up a good ways into it. The components are placed, but not routed. He also posted his eagle files for all the world to use!
A quick pass through eagle to empty it out ...
And a test run to make sure it's dimensionally correct ...
Its a perfect fit! However without the battery connectors and cart slot it doesn't "lock" into place, but the screw holes line up correctly. I'll have to do something to fix that ...[/spoiler]
-=MK1 Is complete=-
Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been spending too much time in the Discord chat and zero time back here on the forums.
Kind of a dark pic, but I think you've seen enough of these things finished before right?
@Helder was kind enough to offer me one of his boards at the last moment, so I went ahead and used that in my build.
Here you can see it nearing completion. I made some, uh .... 'modifications', to @wermy 's screw brackets over the screen in order to fit my driver board. The screen was mounted upside-down in order to try and make the fit better, in the end it made no difference and I left it that way. This particular screen has a flip function built-in, so no changes were made to the pi itself to properly rotate the view.
For the backside I followed Wermy's guide pretty closely, except for the lack of a cart & cart reader which saved a lot of space.
A quick test run to verify if everything is working how I expect it too.
.... and final assembly!
Note: I ended up having to twist both the USB data lines together in order to get a wifi adapter to play nice, along with the USB 1.1 fix.
[spoiler="Tactile Switches"]Something I wanted to try, after not liking the mushy-ness of the stock rubber/silicone pads, was to replace the pads with some of adafruit's soft tactile switches
Design:
Milled & switches installed:
Board mounted:
Regrettably, even the smaller non-soft tactile switches are too large. With the screws fully tightened on the board, the switches are all depressed. Backing them out a bit gives them room to work, but feels a little sloppy.
Since the soft tact switches are a mm or two thicker at the base, plus the soft top, the board will need to be REALLY backed out for them to work, which will also cause problems with the back cover closing, since it's two bottom posts sit right on top of the button board.
This experiment is shelved for now
[/spoiler]Screen Testing.
I "borrowed" an adafruit 2.8" piTFT from my boss at work (an abandoned project, his ADD is almost as bad as mine).
Comparison between the adafruit TFT screen, & the generic $15 amazon. Note the Amazon display has some slight overscan issues in this pic, that isn't a fault of the display, I've just not gotten the right overscan values dialed in.
Amazon Generic (BW?):
Adafruit 2.8" PiTFT:
I also came across an 800x480 DPI 'hat' on aliexress that came with almost no documentation, but it was only $40 so I decided to give it a try.
Here it is compared in EmulationStation (main RetroPie screen):
and the text/console after exiting EmulationStation (plz escuse the mess in the background, that's the adafruit 3.5" SPI hat that I can't get to work in Retropie that you see in the background.):
Note: The yellow lines are from the screen protector that I have not removed.
Unfortunately this screen is exactly as wide as the DMG shell is (technically 1mm narrower), so I'm not really seeing a decent way to use it, it's also a hat which makes it very thick since the pi is directly attached to it and takes up all the pins (no PWM audio, for example).
More to come!
