Published in Hardware

Lite Hardware Concept

Before going digital, you might scribbling down some ideas in a sketchbook.

By Kion

Lite Hardware concept

In my previous post I outlined three devices for Lite, Advance and Pro. For the story I’ve DashGL, I’m focused on the Advance concept. But I want to expand out and design what the Lite and Pro devices would look like, and then have something to align in between. Of the three, the Lite device has the lest amount of ambiguity, so it seems like the best place to start.

Reviewing the Specs

  • Screen
    • 3.5” 480 x 320 SPI display
    • 2.8” 480 x 320 SPI display
    • 3.5” 320 x 240 SPI display
    • 2.8” 320 x 240 SPI display
  • D-pad, A, B, Start, Select, Home
  • Mono Sound
  • Board
    • Pi Pico
    • Pi Zero

The Lite concept is pretty much in the shape of a Gameboy Color, with the main difference on the hardware side being a home button in order to return to the menu. And an updated screen. Otherwise the general size and layout of the hardware would remain the same.

In terms of display, I’m old as fuck, so 2.5 inches is kind of the minimum for me at this point. I think that 2.8” might fit into the original shell, so some adjustments might be made for people to not ruin their eyes. For resolution, I would also try for 480x320 in a 4:3 ratio, for a Pi Zero reference. But for Pi Pico, the size might need to be reduced to something smaller like 320x240.

Software experience

For the software experience, I would want to emulate the experience of programming for the Gameboy Color, by keeping it clunky and trying to force the programmer to understand the underlying hardware without making the experience too clunky. I think that as a baseboard the Pi Pico would make an interesting device for this purpose. Or otherwise the Pi Zero and an SPI display with writing to the framebuffer would also be a possibility.

Instead of providing libraries to extract away the abstractions, in DashGL style we could force the user to derive their own library and learn a set of underlying concepts along the way.

Reference Projects

ReBoi

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameth/reboi-raspberry-pi-in-a-gameboy

This post

http://gijin77.blog.jp/archives/35893338.html

Development Hardware

The hardest part for me on this is getting the breadboad buttons to work, so anything I can find in terms of a kit. Would be preferable.

Pi Pico

  • Pi Pico
  • Buttons
  • Screen
  • Battery

Pi Zero

  • Pi Board
  • Nes Controller
  • Screen
  • Battery