So I've decided to delve into some MCU based projects and I figured that a good place to start was with a RPi Zero. Mainly because it's small, low powered and has plenty of support.
My eventual plan is to create a portable retro console, but small steps first.
So far I have a 1.8" 160x128 LCD and have Raspbian Jessie (with PIXEL) configured to use it. I'm mirroring the main framebuffer to the LCD as well. Still messing with the configuration and experimenting with the best ways to do things as I'm not overly experienced with *nix. In the end it was fairly straight-forward to get running as there are decent fbtft drivers in Jessie as standard. Running Minecraft on such a small display is entertaining
.
I've been looking on some Chinese wholesale websites for a similar sized LCD with a higher resolution - as there are a lot of knock-off smart watches coming out there is a chance I could pick up some sample units on the cheap - but finding info on relevant display controllers and such can be hard.
The next step is to come up with a control scheme. I was initially going to wire everything just through GPIO and use a common ADC IC for analog joystick input - but I think I'm leaning more towards creating a generic USB HID gamepad with the help of an ATTiny board or a teensy etc.
Anyway it's pretty rare for me to do anything hardware based these days so I thought I would share my exploits so far and will update this thread as I progress. I would also appreciate any help/advice along the way from the many experienced hardware guys on this forum as I've been long out of the hardware game - still a lot of learning to do!
A few screenies showing the rpi0 on a breadboard with the LCD connected, dirst successful CLI test and then the screen mirroring with Minecraft running:
My eventual plan is to create a portable retro console, but small steps first.
So far I have a 1.8" 160x128 LCD and have Raspbian Jessie (with PIXEL) configured to use it. I'm mirroring the main framebuffer to the LCD as well. Still messing with the configuration and experimenting with the best ways to do things as I'm not overly experienced with *nix. In the end it was fairly straight-forward to get running as there are decent fbtft drivers in Jessie as standard. Running Minecraft on such a small display is entertaining
.
I've been looking on some Chinese wholesale websites for a similar sized LCD with a higher resolution - as there are a lot of knock-off smart watches coming out there is a chance I could pick up some sample units on the cheap - but finding info on relevant display controllers and such can be hard.
The next step is to come up with a control scheme. I was initially going to wire everything just through GPIO and use a common ADC IC for analog joystick input - but I think I'm leaning more towards creating a generic USB HID gamepad with the help of an ATTiny board or a teensy etc.
Anyway it's pretty rare for me to do anything hardware based these days so I thought I would share my exploits so far and will update this thread as I progress. I would also appreciate any help/advice along the way from the many experienced hardware guys on this forum as I've been long out of the hardware game - still a lot of learning to do!
A few screenies showing the rpi0 on a breadboard with the LCD connected, dirst successful CLI test and then the screen mirroring with Minecraft running:
"My world is Black & White. But if I blink fast enough, I see it in Grayscale."
