Hasta La Gadget!

A couple of weeks ago we saw a Kickstarter fundraiser for a desktop arcade machine based on the Raspberry Pi. It turns out that hacker and tinkerer Jeroen Domburg has already made a tinier, yet also functional machine based on the same computer.

Wow. So many wonderful features in such a tiny package. I think it’s as small, if not smaller, than the Space Invader cabinet we saw a while back, but this one runs MAME so it can run tons of classic (and not-so-classic) games. It has a transparent cabinet made from laser-cut acrylic, a 2.4″ LCD screen and an itty bitty OLED display up top that displays the logo of the game being played (if available). It runs on a Li-ion battery that can be recharged via USB.

This project is definitely not for beginners, but if you have the skills Domburg has posted a thorough step-by-step on his website.

[via TechCrunch]

When I first saw this tiny gaming cabinet this morning, I was fascinated. Who was the creator, Sprite_tm, and why did he do such and excellent and thorough job of turning a tiny Rasberry Pi device into a little gaming cabinet? In short, how did he get inspired as a maker?

I sent him a few questions and he was kind enough to reply.

TC: I love the project. Why did you do it?

Jeroen: The intro to the article basically states that already: I had a Raspberry Pi and I wanted to get familiar to how it works. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox: need a powerful controller running a standard OS for your robot / Internet-controlled doorbell / Twitter-based death ray? Just get one of these for a few quid. Knowing how they work means I can put them to work much faster the next time, which may come in handy if I actually try to make something useful.

TC: Who are you?

J: I’m Jeroen Domburg, nickname Sprite_tm. I’m a 30-year old software/hardware guy from the east of the Netherlands. I’ve been fiddling with electronics all my life and when I studied electronic engineering, I decided my projects should get a site of their own. That site became Spritesmods.com and I’ve been adding projects to it since. In real life, I have a job as a software engineer at a broadcast equipment manufacturer.

TC: What was the most difficult part?

J: I thought it would be designing the case; I’ve never designed something to be lasercut before, and immediately trying a ‘weird’ shape instead of a cube to try it on meant I’d have to learn about quite a few things. In the end, it did take up a lot of time to make sure I got everything right, but the process itself wasn’t as complex as I thought.

The most difficult part probably was the LiIon circuitry. Not only because the design itself is tricky (some components have two or three separate functions, making it hard to not break function A when you want to modify function B) but also because LiIon-batteries have the nasty habit of going ‘boom’ when you mis-treat them. It took some time and calculation to convince myself it was actually going to work OK all the time, and even if one part doesn’t do its job, I still won’t have an explosion on my hands.

TC: How did you start hacking?
J: I don’t know why I started it, mostly because I was probably too young to remember. It’s always been a hobby of mine, even in my childhood I’ve been tearing apart stuff to see how it works. I’ve never made hacking in itself my daytime job, although I’ve always been trying to get some overlap: hacking and electronic and software engineering go well with each other ofcourse.

TC: What’s your advice for folks trying to hack their own Raspberry Pi projects?

J: Just dive into it! Raspberry Pi’s are cheap as chips, and the community supporting it isn’t half bad. So, if you have an idea, just get one, read up on whatever you’re going to need and just try to make it work.

TC: Easy for you to say. What’s your favorite arcade game?

J: From a technical point of view, I really like the vector arcade games. It’s awesome to read the engineers had to almost build their own secondary CPU from scratch to get the vectors working, not to speak of the analog mess involved. I actually built one myself – Black Widow – just to see if I could do it.

Just to play, I have a soft spot for Dragon Saber. I ran into one of those on a holiday, and fell in love with the levels and especially the music. I also like Outrun, I was addicted to the PC-version when I was young and the arcade version is even better.

There is just something about the wonders of miniaturization, and what happens when a geek decides to work on an extremely small arcade cabinet? The kind of computing power that he needs to fall back upon would be rather limited, but this is where the unique and versatile Raspberry Pi (which is due for an update with a camera, by the way) comes in handy. Sure, the Raspberry Pi is definitely far from being the most powerful computer in the market, but it does pack more than enough punch to handle classic arcade-style video games. Not only that, since it has a size that is smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi made the perfect fit to run a tiny arcade cabinet.

Attached to the Raspberry Pi is a 2.4-inch 320 x 240 pixel LCD display, where it was built with a custom case in tow to make the entire shebang resemble that of a classic video arcade cabinet. When loaded with the MAME video game emulator software, you know you are in for an ass kicking time – Double Dragon 2, here we come! Other hardware specifications include itty bitty speakers, a joystick and a quartet of buttons, not to mention a small 128 x 32 pixel OLED display which is located right above the screen, telling you which game is loaded at the moment.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Gamers launch GTA 5 petition to bring the game onto the PC, Wii Mini listing spotted on Best Buy’s website corroborates 7th December release date,

The $35 Raspberry Pi hobby board is one of the most innovative pieces of circuitry that we’ve seen yet. It’s so simple and cheap, yet it leads to thousands of hackers and modders cooking up their own concoctions of circuitry brilliance. One modder in particular, Sprite_tm, recently made a pocket-size MAME cabinet out of a Raspberry Pi and a few other pieces of circuitry.

Sprite uses a Raspberry Pi board to run the MAME from Linux, and then uses use an SPI-controlled 2.4-inch TFT display instead of dealing with video outputs. Sprite also wanted to have the cabinet run off of batteries in order to make it portable, so he used old mobile phone batteries along with a cleverly-designed charging circuit. So, when the power supply is connected to +5V, the batteries charge up, and when that power is removed, an ATtiny85 microcontroller provides 5V of power to the cabinet using the mobile phone batteries.

Sprite even added a marquee to the MAME cabinet, which is a tiny 128×32 white OLED display, in this case. The display will show the logo of the game currently being played on the cabinet. Everything in the system is set up to be completely seamless when switching between games, and it automatically re-configures the controls and marquee when switching to a new game.

While this may not be a permanent and dedicated arcade solution for most gamers, the ingenuity behind this tiny Raspberry Pi-powered MAME cabinet is one of coolest mods we’ve seen recently, bar none. The video above shows Sprite himself testing out the machine by playing some Bubble Bobble and then switching to Nemesis later on.

[via Hack a Day]

Raspberry Pi MAME cabinet brings the arcade to your tiny fingertips is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Raspberry Pi will soon be able to see all, thanks to an upcoming camera board that will mate with unused CSI pins on the $35 hobbyist board. The new 5-megapixel camera (in the video after the break) will be capable of 1080P, 30fps video, and though the prototype being shown at Electronica 2012 is attached using scotch tape technology, the Pi foundation promised it would come with a proper mount when it ships in the new year for $25. In other news, the group has also announced a new port from the Notch gaming group called “Minecraft: Pi edition.” You’ll be able to play the game, of course, but if you’re feeling more ambitious it’ll also support several programming languages, letting you “modify the game world with code” to boot. The group promised you’ll be able to download it next week at the source.

Continue reading Raspberry Pi says it’ll run Minecraft, demos upcoming 5-megapixel, 1080P, $25 camera

Filed under: Cameras, Robots, Science

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