First of all I would like to say a big thank you to the community and to Wermy, I came across the Game Boy Zero build while doing an internet search. I was instantly hooked as I am sure most of you were also. After spending copious amounts of money on everything I needed.. I have finally finished the game boy zero, of course it's probably never really finished as I always find a way to add extra features such as battery monitoring etc...
Some of the features I did differently than most was the layout... My first attempt was an absolute disaster.. it was so packed full of wires I couldn't even close it up. I ended up ripping out all the wiring and re-thinking the entire layout and wiring scheme. The second round went a lot smoother and resulted in a much better layout and wiring as seen below:
One of the nice things I found was a tiny little USB hub that has 3 ports. This saved a lot of room during the build and was pretty easy to disassemble and remove all the connectors (as they were pigtail cables). I left one of the cables on the USB Hub for the wifi dongle, which I can remove if needed. You can see the hub just below the analog volume pot.
I ended up using an i2c controller board from Kitsch-bent. This eliminated a lot of the wiring to the Teensy 3.2, which required only 4 wires. Power, Ground, SCL, SDA. Of course this means you have to write some code to translate the i2c commands to USB Keyboard commands.
One thing I also added was a graceful shutdown using the Teensy 3.2 as well as the PI. As you can see below there is a wire from the switch to the PI and then also connected to the Teensy. This is to detect the switch position so both the PI and Teensy know when the switch has been turned off. Also note I didn't add an emergency latch to reset the PI in case of lock up. The reason is that the Teensy will drop the EN pin on the power boost after a pre-determined amount of time if it does not detect that the PI has successfully shutdown (via the TX pin 14). I also enabled the Watchdog Timer on the PI, so if the PI does lock up, it will automatically re-boot. I will write up a separate post on how to do the graceful shutdown using the Teensy and PI and how to enable the Watchdog Timer in the PI. I ran out of ground connections so I ended up using the USB port as a grounding port
I ran two power distribution circuits to cut down on the wiring between the two halves, so on the display side I have a power distribution board (made from some perf board) and jump the power to the right distribution board, this keeps the wiring clean.
All in all in was a fun project and have some friends and co-workers asking if I can build them one. I think I will wait for the Kite's full board which makes things a lot easier and doesn't break the bank account.
The display is the 640x480 and it's a tight fit, but the display is crisp and clear and really worth the extra cost. If anyone has any questions or needs some help... just drop me a PM and I would be happy to answer any questions or provide some guidance.
Some of the parts:
1. Raspberry Pi Zero
2. Teensy 3.2
3. Elegiant mini USB Hub for Galaxy or Smart Phone https://www.amazon.com/ELEGIANT-Charge- ... ant+4+Port
4. Powerboost 1000C
5. Adafruit 2.5w mono amplifier
6. Kitsch-bent i2c expanded button PCB http://www.sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 701#p21701 - for info
7. 640x480 PD035VX2 Display
8. Easy PWM Filter/module from Kitsch-bent
9. kk_gb_zero_c SD cartridge from Kitsch-bent
10. DMG01 Empty Game Cartridge
11. Assorted GB buttons, Audio 10k Pot & Speaker
12. 2500mah Lipo Battery
13. Custom 3D printed parts for button wells and a mount for the Pi.
Still to do are the L1 and R1 buttons as I am still waiting on the parts to arrive, a 3D printed latch for the top of the GB and the audio jack.
PS: If anyone knows how to add expand/collapse to images, please let me know as I don't know how to do this in BBCode, so I apologize for the image load times.
Dale
