The idea for the PCB console came to me because I really wanted to make a PCB that is cool and entretaining and onme of the only ways to do it is to make a mini handheld console, for it I took a lot of inspiration from other existing consoles, especially from the nintendo DS for its button layout and general design. ited the console to be able to play retro games (NES or/and GameBoy) so I used the same buttons those consoles used.
Making the console was a little chalenge for me as I had never designed a PCB that complex, but I studied a lot and revised the design a lot of times to make sure it would work. I chose this PCB type for my console, with a black design to be simple but elegant and with white text to contrast it:
After some months of designing it in my spare time as I had some time problems due to exams and projects I had to do for my studies the design was complete. I exported the BOM and send the PCB to manufacturing but I had some problems with the BOM as the materials I had used were out of stock and it took some time and a lot of different BOMs to fix it. My design has some multi color LED that you can program so it can sync with the game and give it a cool and shiny design, it has a ABXY buutton pad arrow buttons and the classic start and select buttons. It can load games though a micro SD card reader on the top and also connect to a computer to program the chip directly. It has a speaker and an audio jack so you can play at night without annoying anyone 😊. It works with a raspberry pi microcontroller and has 16M-BIT flash memory to process the games which in my hurry for submitting the board on time for the contest I forgot to add, so I had to pause production and update the BOM (Again 😮💨) so that the console would have flash memory, but in the end it all worked out 😊.
For the competition I really wanted to show the working console but I ran into a big problem. The PCB hasn't arrived yet 😅 so all I can do unfortunatelly is show the design and code for my console and once it arrives I will show the working design. To not loose any time I started working on the code for the console. I used an already existing open source NES emulator I found in Git-Hub as the core for my project.
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