My own GBZ project

[144TECH]

if you use te one buck charger boards, they have a led for low battery, that should be good to go, you can solder it off and make 2 wires and hook up your led somewhere else, but there are enough buck boards, also a battery indicator.. just Google arduino or raspberry battery indicator. or ebay.. it's not that hard. and for the timer chips, they are just the same as a shutdown except the switch. (and offcourse it works, they are made for that ) http://www.dx.com/p/ka2284-power-level- ... JEK4ziFhkg

but i wouldn't mess up my case drilling holes and shit for these led's omg
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2Pcs-12V-Electr ... 1794576007

For me personally 1 smd led would be fine, if it goes red or orange, when the battery is getting low ..
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Micro-USB-Port- ... SwOtBXS9mw

And the powerboost often has a battery low led too, so solder it off attach 2 wires and hookup a led
But at the other hand it would be nice to use a one buck board on the place of the gb case left (next to hdmi) so you can see it litting up because there's little space around the hole in the case.. but its up to you

[wermy]

Moving this to the showoff corner since it's sort of turned into a build log.

[correia5022]

Moving this to the showoff corner since it's sort of turned into a build log.

yeah, sort of. Thanks

[yogurtcup]

1800th view!

Sorry, but good work!

[correia5022]

Hey guys.
I'm going to resurrect this topic

Since that time (2016), i stopped my project because i had to move to a new country (work). But i never stopped wandering and want to build my BGZ. I had all the parts and bits, so now, 2019, i have some free time back to home and started my work.

Yes, they're 2016 parts, so you wont see the fancy boards... i have all parts laying around, so why not using them to learn?

This weekend i modified the front half of the case, placed a glass screen protector, glued up my 3.5 inch lcd (upside down because the bezel was interfering with the button whells), placed the buttons and its PCB.
Also did a homemade bracket to screw both halfs.

Now i'm moving to bottom half part, and need time to think what i must do. I have some 3000mAh batteries that i thought they fit the battery compartment, but actually dont they are taller...

[correia5022]

1st step, remove the screen from the backup monitor case, mod and test it

Checking that screen mod worksShow

Mod the front half GB case, and place the parts (screen protector, buttons, membranes, screen, bracket, button pcb)

OutsideShow

InsideShow

[correia5022]

Now, as for the controls. I have a bunch of pro micro leonardo boards and i will go for that.
So my idea is to use it as a controller and since it has ADC built in (10-bit) i will try to use it as a battery monitor system

As for controller, @sota has a great tutorial, but i've seen a post by @hencethus programming it as a gamepad instead of trigger for keyboard. Does anyone know's what's best? sota or hencethus? (i mean, personnal preference, is it quicker, will it get double tap issues, etc)

To be able to use battery monitor feature, i saw some posts related to this theme, i think is just a matter of ajusting the values in the python code, since they are talking about the ads1015 (12-bit), and use @HoolyHoo Mintypi battery monitor script.

Am i forgetting something or mistaken?

[correia5022]

Well, this few days i started electronics.. and started the frustations and dissapointments..
I had bought those "4 Ports High Speed 480Mbps USB 2.0 HUB" working alternative mentioned in the wiki, but for my surprise none of it actually worked for me.
I wired the pi0 to hdmi, power from my usb3 port of desktop, and the microUSB data plug to those USB hubs.
To the Hub i added a keyboard, a snes fake controller, a usb sound card and a generic wifi dongle.
nothing... only keyboard was recognized in ES...
removed the hub, put another (maybe this one was ruined)... same, just the keyboard. no wifi (ip), no sound
maybe the otg cable was bad, replaced for new one.... the same...
so i fetched a different HUB, and worked...
unfortunatly this hub is bigger than those black ones...
But ok, i now know that this generic hubs make the little pi funny...
i got to my desktop just to check the 2 (out of 5 or 6 i bouhgt) black hubs, and both of them works flawless, with all flash drives, the snes controller, everything.. omg wtf??
meanwhile i started sending some splashscreens and ro.m.s to the pi (at least this works... for a while). After some reboots and trying to put sound to work, one og this wifi dongles did not worked anymore. the pi does not recognize any device plugged.. just great
fetch another wifi dongle... used it for maybe 2 time (this one has an external antena) and when i was grabbing it, i felt the antena was loose... and no more connection to the pi..
the antena was disattached from the pcb. i tried to solder it back, but never worked again...
So yeah, i'm really frustrated with all this.. so many things not working...

[correia5022]

The failled componentsShow

[infinitLoop]

sounds a lot like my first attempt too.. many frustrations. it does feel good if/when you can work through them though, if that helps

for the usb hubs, what i have picked up looking around is that some hubs apparently do something to register each usb device connected to them in their own board, or something like that, and some don't (not sure how that works when they don't - they all flow through one serial channel, or use the same interrupt or something?? or rely on the computer to manage it and the zero can't? i didn't research any further than that ) - so, in other words, if someone doesn't guarantee that the zero works with your hub, then it might be a no-go, even when it works on a pc. twisting the data wire helps some too, but doesn't solve everything.

i ran into a lot of frustration getting the hub working on my first one, and ended up scrapping the hub, and just running the board controller into the pi's usb. i think my issues were with the solder points or the wires, but it could have been the hub itself. i found one that people said they had used successfully before, but who knows. i threw it in a drawer, so i might try it again some time. it would have helped to do more testing before i started soldering it in, but live-and-learn. tinkerboy has a really nifty, and tiny, usb hub board, so i'm planning on using that for my next usb-based build, but i haven't started that yet. hopefully i don't have the issues with the usb sound, since that's the first time i'll be trying that.