We were inspired by the dual-screen clamshell (faux-vertical) design of several older video game consoles, as well as games that are objectively better when played in the orientation they were meant for.
Our console has slide-on split-controllers that can attach to all four edges, making it possible to play vertical and horizontal games with ease.
The console shell and split-controller cases were 3D printed with PLA. A Raspberry Pi 4 is powered by a battery and runs on a 7" touch screen display. Each controller has one microcontroller to process input from a joystick, bumper and trigger buttons, and D-Pad buttons. A master microcontroller back in the main shell organizes everything for the raspberry pi.
Making room for all the necessary external ports on the console was difficult, as the joycon rails on all four sides take up most of the edge space. We did quite a bit of internal tetris with the raspberry pi, battery, and BMS---and ended up reworking nearly every port.
We're proud of our shell design (especially the slide-on rails), and the controllers we made (which were not as chunky as we feared they'd be).
We definitely learned to include (sometimes generous) margins on everything when designing 3D models for print, and the perfect mobile operating system for this Raspberry Pi and tablet (KDE Mobile).
Since our prototype is quite chunky and has some sharp corners, our next step is to create more ergonomic controllers and streamline the console's appearance with rounded corners. Given more time, we might also find a more efficient internal layout that could save height in the console.
Built With
- 3dprinting
- arduino
- c
- kde
- raspberry-pi
- rp2040
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