PiBoy Advance

Abstract

Handheld Raspberry Pi device that uses a 320×240 or 480×320 screen, with ‘Super-Nintendo’ style controls.

Screen Size: 3.5 Inch
Screen Resolution: 480×320
Controls: dpad, start, select, A, B, X, Y, L, R
Sound: Mono-speaker

Prototype

1. Raspberry Pi
2. Microsd (for OS)
3. Adafruit Display (Driver) / HDMI Option / 3.2 Inch
4. SNES USB controller
5. fullsize SD card reader
6. SD card (for games)

Concept Art

Analysis

The Piboy Advance seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to grab the parts for a prototype. Cheap screen hats are everywhere, as well as usb super nintendo gamepads. After finding out that an open source driver was available for these screens, I thought it had made this process a lot more viable. Only to run into a small problem, the cheap screen displays are ungodly hard to look at. The light bleed is terrible and the colors are so washed out that it’s really hard to look at for more than a few minutes.

I can look around and try to find a good quiality screen that does’t have terrible colors, but for right now I’m pretty happy having the definition for general screensize, resolution, and the buttons avaialble.