First, the parts list:
- Raspberry Pi3
- 3.5" PiTFT (clone of the Waveshare one) Link
- Adafruit 4400mAh Li-ion battery Link
- Adafruit powerboost 1000c Link
- Mono speaker and headphone jack salvaged from a broken set of headphones [You could just pick these up from the JayCar's equivalent in your country for less than 2 dollars.
- 16gb Transflash card with SD adapter [Bought from JB for $18]
- Adafruit 150mm DuPont Jumper cables Link
- A Leonardo Pro micro clone (same one used by sotasystems' GamePi3) I got this from a local distributor, but for those not in Aus get it from sparkfun Link
- The Buttons and conductive pads from a Broken Mega drive controller I already had
- Slide switch salvaged from a broken wireless mouse
That's everything I have bought so far, but I need to stock up on some Tac switches for the L/R buttons, a new soldering iron, (the last one lost it's magic blue smoke) perfboard to more easily mount the buttons on. I got a clear DMG-01 shell from ebay, I wanted one of the nice Hand-held-legend or Kitsch-Bent ones, but the shipping rates to this country were exorbitant. I will be picking up a few more miscellaneous things from Jaycars, which is a local electronics shop, somewhat similar to RadioShack in the US.
Enough spiel, onto the planning!
Firstly I got the dimensions of the DMG gameboy from the Nintendo website and printed an outline of those dimensions onto a piece of paper in real size. I then laid components onto the sheet to get a feel for where components should sit. I eventually decided to lay the Pi3 horizontally, as it would give the right screen layout, and also make it easy to cut a hole to access the USB and Ethernet ports.
It's a tight squeeze, but it should fit. I thought about desoldering the ports on the Pi, but elected not to, as I was worried about permanently damaging the pi, and the screen was taking up that height anyway. The little scrap of paper marked 'Teensy LC' represents the Leonardo microcontroller, as I was going to use a Teensy LC, but like sota's GamePi, I found it was cheaper to get the micro in this country than the Teensy. It can't be seen, but the on/off switch will be in the original GameBoy position.
I am going to Jaycar tomorrow to buy a switched jack to disable the speaker the speaker when headphones are plugged in, and a variable resister for the volume knob. The leonardo is due to arrive in the post sometime in the next week, but the GB shell will only be arriving in mid February. The name, 'GameBoy Athena' comes from the Greek god, who was born from the brain of Zeus, like this project was born from my brain. Also it's just a cool name. That's all for now, (27/01/17) I will post more tomorrow as I get more work done.