handheld

75 Articles

Fight A Minotaur With This Gorgeous Handheld

June 19, 2017 by 4 Comments

[Jason Carlson]’s favorite game as kid was 1983’s Treasure of Tarmin by Intellivision, a maze game that eventually came to be called Minotaur. As an adult there was only one thing he could do: remake it on a beautiful Arduino-based handheld.

[Jason] built the handheld out of a small-footprint Arduino Mega clone, a 1.8” LCD from Adafruit, a 5 V booster, a 1” speaker and vibe motor for haptic feedback. There are some nice touches, like the joystick with a custom Sugru top and a surprisingly elegant 2 x AA battery holder — harvested from a Yamaha guitar.

The maze maps are all the same as the original game, which [Jason] found online, but he stored the maps as bytes in an array to speed up the game—there was a flicker in the refresh already. However he added a progress map so players could see every area that was explored. In addition to Minotaur [Jason] also added remakes of Tetris, Simon and Snake, simpler games he wrote to test out the hardware.

We’ve published a bunch of handheld gaming projects over the years, including putting a Pi Zero in a GameBoy, building a throwback handheld, and playing Ocarina of Time on a N64 handheld.

Continue reading “Fight A Minotaur With This Gorgeous Handheld” →

MP3 Player And Handheld GPS Is An Odd Combo Work Of Art

November 8, 2016 by 15 Comments

We think [Brek Martin] set out to build a handheld GPS and ended up adding an mp3 Player to it. Regardless, it’s beautifully constructed. Hand built circuit boards and even a custom antenna adorn this impressive build.

The core of the build is a 16 bit microcontroller a dsPIC33FJ128GP802 from Microchip. It’s a humble chip to be doing so much. It uses a UBlox NEO-6M positioning module for the location and a custom built QFH antenna built after calculations done with an online calculator for the GPS half. The audio half is based around a VLSI VS1003b decoder chip.

The whole build is done with protoboard. Where the built in traces didn’t suffice enamel and wire wrap wire were carefully routed and soldered in place. There’s a 48pin LQFP package chip soldered dead bug style that’s impressive to behold.  You can see some good pictures in this small gallery below.

Continue reading “MP3 Player And Handheld GPS Is An Odd Combo Work Of Art” →

Upgrade The Graphics On A Sega Game Gear To Mental

March 15, 2016 by 23 Comments

[Nino K] built a portable game player for text adventures. He decided he had spent enough time with the ATmega328 kit from NerdKits to build a more advanced project.

To start with, he built a prototype PCB and tested out the concept. It worked so he began on the real thing. He tore out the guts from a broken Game Gear, saving some parts like those responsible for supplying power. Impressively, he etched his own replacement boards for the Game Gear’s control pads; surprising himself at how simple it ended up being. He fit a 16×4 LCD into the space previously occupied by the Game Gear’s screen.

The program itself is a simple text adventure of his own creation. He even added little 8-bit sprites. The story is classic, a princess has gotten herself in some trouble and a brave hero has been coerced into saving her. Last, he added some music and sound effects from Zelda with a piezo buzzer.

This project is guaranteed to disappoint a visiting younger cousin or relative, but we like to think of that as a feature and not a bug. Great work!

Game And Watch

Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch

June 15, 2015 by 15 Comments

One of the earliest Nintendo products to gain popularity was the Game and Watch product line. Produced by Nintendo between 1980 and 1991, they are a source of nostalgia for many an 80s or 90s kid. These were those electronic handheld games that had pre-drawn monochrome images that would light up to make very basic animations. [Andrew] loved his old “Vermin” game as a kid, but eventually he sold it off. Wanting to re-live those childhood memories, he decided to build his own Game and Watch emulator.

The heart of [Andrew’s] build is a PIC18F4550 USB demo board he found on eBay. The board allows you to upload HEX files directly via USB using some simple front end software. [Andrew] wrote the code for his game in C using MPLAB. His device uses a Nokia 5110 LCD screen and is powered from a small lithium ion battery.

For the housing, [Andrew] started from another old handheld game that was about the right size. He gutted all of the old parts and stuck the new ones in their place. He also gave the housing a sort of brushed metal look using spray paint. The end result is a pretty good approximation of the original thing as evidenced by the video below. Continue reading “Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch” →

Handheld Linux Terminal Gets An A+

January 17, 2015 by 40 Comments

Are you all thumbs when it comes to Linux? If you follow [Chris]’s guide to building a handheld Linux terminal, that particular condition could work to your advantage. His pocket-sized machine is perfect for practicing command line-fu and honing your scripting skills on the go.

[Chris]’s creation is built around a Raspberry Pi A+ that he stripped to its essentials by removing the GPIO pins, HDMI and USB ports, the audio port, and the camera and display ports. It’s housed in a pair of plastic 2.5″ hard drive enclosures connected with a piano hinge, making it about the size of a Nintendo DS. The display is an Adafruit PiTFT touch screen and in order to save space, he soldered it directly to the Pi.

The 2.4GHz wireless thumb keyboard has all the special characters necessary for Linuxing, but the four USB ports from a dismantled hub provide flexibility. If [Chris] were to make another one, he might use this slightly larger screen from Tindie and add some charging ports to the case.

[Thanks for the tip, ar0cketman]

Phoenard, A Prototyping Gadget

November 14, 2014 by 6 Comments

The Hackaday Prize party wasn’t just about the five finalists; actually, there were more THP entries in attendance – All Yarns Are Beautiful, OpenExposer, M.A.R.S., a 3D scanner, and a few more that I’m forgetting – than actual finalists. In addition, a number of people brought projects that had never seen the light of day, like [Ralf] and [Pamungkas]’ Phoenard.

Phoenard is a Kickstarter project the guys launched at the prize party, something they could attend as a little side trip after manning the ‘maker’ part of the Atmel booth at Electronica. They’ve come up with a tiny handheld device that can only be described as a ‘gadget’. It has a touchscreen, a battery, an MegaAVR, a few connectors, and not much else. What makes this project cool is how they’re running their applications. A bootloader sits on the AVR, but all the applications – everything from a GSM phone to an MP3 player – lives on a microSD card.

The Phoenard guys have come up with a few expansion modules for Bluetooth LE, GSM, GPS, and all the usual cool modules. Plugging one of these modules into the back of the device adds capability, and if that isn’t enough, there’s an old 30-pin iPhone connector on the bottom ready to accept a prototyping board.

Video of these guys below.

Continue reading “Phoenard, A Prototyping Gadget” →

Gamebuino: A Handheld Arduino Gaming Console Ready For Prime Time

February 27, 2014 by 18 Comments

[Rodot] wrote in to tell us about the Gamebuino, a very nicely designed and easily reproducible version of his handheld Arduino gaming console. We originally featured [Rodot’s] Arduino based gaming console over a year ago.

With the Gamebuino, you too can build your own games and gaming hardware around the Arduino. While there is a lot of information currently missing from the site’s Wiki, such as the layout and game code, [Rodot] plans on making everything open source. The console includes a rechargeable lithium battery, a micro SD card, and I2C expansion connectors. This is one project to keep an eye (and two hands) on, especially since a full game library is going to be provided, letting you easily create your own games. See what the console can do in the demo video after the break.

It would be amazing so see some old Game Boy games ported to run on the Arduino, or maybe one of our readers can make an Game Boy emulator for the Arduino!
Continue reading “Gamebuino: A Handheld Arduino Gaming Console Ready For Prime Time” →