Project in Action

About the Project

As an introduction to Schematic Capture, PCB Design, and Circuit Design, I decided to build a custom handheld emulator based around the Raspberry PI. For this project, I wanted to create a handheld emulator capable of emulating consoles from the PS1 era and before. I wanted to include analog joysticks for input, a reusable battery and charging circuit, as well as a touch screen for use with Nintendo DS emulation.

The project uses Emulation Station on the Raspberry PI, SPI for analog to digital conversion, includes a LiPo battery and charging circuit, and has a headphone jack and micro USB charging port. Analog to digital conversion, input was done in C++ using the WiringPi library and linux libevdev to convert the GPIO inputs into OS readable input events.

The entire project, including circuit design, PCB design, mechanical design, programming, and assembly was done over the course of 2 months. The project even includes a custom 3D printed enclosure with custom buttons.

This project is one of my favourite projects to date, and I have plans to create an improved version based around the Raspberry Pi CM4, making it thinner and adding new features.