Introducing the Minty Pi Pico!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- Update: A circuit board to make this easier to build has been created! Unboxing video for that board is here • MintyPiPico circuit bo...
And the boards are now working!:
• MintyPiPico boards work!
Transcript:
This is the Minty Pi Pico. It was inspired by building a mintyPi, and uses many of the same ideas. It's really just a PicoPad repackaged into an Altoids Smalls tin. I'm using the stock PicoPad firmware, which means it can play video games and even 10 frames per second video. So, for example, my favorite (PacMac).
It uses an RP2040-Zero board, a USB charger board with a 5-volt output, (a battery), a microSD card board, a custom push-pull SMD audio board, an SMD push-on and off circuit for the power button. And it uses, like some of the versions of the MintyPi, it uses Nintendo DS Lite buttons and the dome switch tactile switches. And I used a speaker out of an old cell phone because a regular Gameboy speaker it's just too big to fit in here. And a 2 inch ST7789 LCD display from Buy Display (and a battery, of course). There's lots of 30 gauge wire wrap wire to connect it all. And that I solder, I hand solder everything. And I had to modify the tin to get everything to fit. I suppose someday I'll make a PC board to get it to fit into an unmodified tin. And I 3D printed all of the case components myself.
So, here's all the connectors and such. On the back, we've got the RP2040 reset and boot button and so that you can press the boot button (I accidentally said reset button) and plug in a USB-C here to program it. There's the speaker on the left and the charge port on the right. There's the micro SD card port there.
I'll show you how to make, how to play the videos on this. So you plug in the SD card in the slot there, micro SD card, power it up, and then you navigate down to the VIDEOS folder, press A, go to the videos, press A, and now it's erasing and loading everything in there. So you just go ahead and press play the video you want to play. And video quality is actually pretty good at 10 frames per second.
The procedure is kind of long to convert them. I haven't done one yet of my own videos, but these are the four that are included in the firmware. If you didn't know it was 10 frames per second you might not recognize it right away. Well, that's how you play the videos.
OK now, to get back to the video game menu, since you replaced the video games with videos, we have to go down to the GAME menu, press A, select that, and then go down to MULTISET, which has all the games. You can load some individually if you want, and it'll erase that and load in. It'll take a while to load in all of the games, the 16 games that are on the original menu. And once that's done you can just turn it off, pull out the SD card, turn it back on and you'll get the original menu which we'll see in a second here.
Sped up: (It takes a while to load. If you're only ever going to play like Pac-Man you can load just Pac-Man and then this goes quicker. But the load time when you first power up isn't bad, so...)
Okay, and there you are. You're back to that menu. And next time you turn it on, it'll come up with that menu.
Thanks for watching.
List of components used:
RP2040-Zero: www.ebay.ca/it...
USB-C charger board: www.ebay.ca/it...
Battery: www.amazon.ca/...
Micro SD card reader: www.amazon.ca/...
Nintendo DS Lite buttons: www.ebay.ca/it...
Nintendo DS Lite clear rubber pads: www.ebay.ca/it...
Tactile dome switches: www.digikey.ca...
IPS 2" LCD display 240x320 ST7789: www.ebay.ca/it...
12-conductor FPC cable for LCD: www.digikey.ca...
M2x4mm self-tapping screws: www.ebay.ca/it...
I used Creality Ender PLA Filament 1.75mm on a Flashforge Finder 3D printer
I can make STL files available to anyone interested.
PicoPad website: picopad.eu/en/
#picopad #RP2040 #mintypi #videogames
Very cool
@@jdzdrifthouse Thanks. It was fun!
This definitely beats Minty. 😃
@@billypoe3703 Thank you! Definitely inspired by Minty Pi. I like tiny things.
So cool!
@@gamebitscanada4716 Thanks! Using parts from your site.😁
And now...circuit boards are here! th-cam.com/video/DqpMPEcuoJs/w-d-xo.html
Complete details on the build are here:
www.hackster.io/MrRobotElectronics/mintypipico-tiny-video-game-7907b8
I thought from the Thumbnail of the video that its just a parody
of how tiny we trying to get in the handheld emulators scene.
Cant believe its real LMAO!
@@GamingSc ...and it can emulate Gameboy and Nintendo games! I had no idea when I built it 😄
@@scottgilson3247 this is amazing! also forgot to say you did a great job keep it up man!
@@GamingSc Thank you!
Very compact. I' love clamshell designs. Highly likely it's the world's first Picopad based clamshell. The video encoding process is well documented, but hellish. It's all in the PicoLibSDK_doc zip file. Anyway, great work!
@@megazoid Thanks!
Yes, I've reviewed the video encoding process, would like to port the Photoshop portion to GIMP so I can create a script for Linux (Mint).
Being a hardware guy who only does software when absolutely necessary, or someone else has written a Dummies guide, I was excited to see you run emulators. No Dummies guide for that, so far. :-/
@@scottgilson3247 I deviated from the video encoding process and used FFmpeg and Xnconvert at some stages. It was still very hands-on sadly. With the emulators - if you take a good look at the breatharian link (top link) in my last video description and scroll right down to the emulator section, you may find some "prepared" type external links if you know what I mean...
The encoding process of video creation in PicoLibSDK is quite unfortunate, as the RP2040 cannot load video from the SD card fast enough. However, it will be interesting to use the Pico2 RP2350, which is considerably more powerful, and could handle some standard compression formats - my best hopes are for MOV MJPEG, which contains simple JPG frames - with ARMv8m's hardware float support, decoding should be easy and fast.
Miroslav, I'm honored by your comment. Great work on the PicoPad and SDK, and addition of the RP2350.
The next revision of this will use the RP2350. Right now they're not available, but I plan to remove some from boards I've ordered. The emulation seems very good now, but will enjoy being able to play standard formats. Thanks for everything you do!!
@@scottgilson3247 The RP2350 has excellent capabilities, there is not yet much software available to take full advantage of them. Oh and - I like your miniature console! ☺(I shared info about it on the Twitter)