sudomod

Hey guys,

Thought I would share my picicle build. You can find a kit here:

https://www.tindie.com/products/Picicle/picicle-kit/

This is a nice kit, I really like the clear plexi case, and it feels nice in the hand. It uses a 3.2" SPI screen, which looks nice, and nintendo DS lite button membranes with acrylic buttons. I used a 2500mah battery, and have not yet tested the battery life, but would expect 4+ hours.

All parts are SMD and require hand soldering, so if you do not have experience with that, it may be a challenge for you. For me personally, it was nice and easy. Came together quite quickly....Although I did have a couple of issues.

I had noticed that battery would not charge, with the help of the creator, we found that the TP4056 chip was bad. I desoldered it, and harvested a TP4056 from another board. Soldered that on and it now charges fine. I am not sure why the original chip failed, or or may have come as a dud.

I also had a bad pi, which was super annoying. I do not often test pi's before I used them....But in this case I should have, since I noticed after soldering it to the board. I would get constant segmentation faults, and freezing. Tried 6 memory cards and multiple images...All to no avail. Got another pi, desoldered the old one (only lifted 2 pads by accident). Soldered the new one, and it works as well.

Only issue was the two lifted pads, one was for the 'B' button, and the other for the 'R' button, solving that consisted of running some magnet wired to a via.

Few things I don't like, the mini USB is weird, I had to go buy a cable since I had none laying around, micro USB or USB-c would have been preferred. Audio is okay, but there is some static, and the wheel is not very responsive. This is typical of PWM audio, I would have preferred i2s or USB audio. Otherwise, no complaints.

Here are some pics:

Thanks for sharing, especially the summary of your troubleshooting. Still trying to find time to put my kit together but definitely looking foward to it now