(COMPLETED) Portable Pi Zero - 3d Printed

[LukeC]

Hey!

I recently bought my Dad a 3D printer for his birthday; one of those presents which you buy for someone else knowing full well you're going to be using it more than them! I've been scouring the net for a challenge, and I stumbled upon people making raspberry pi portables. In the past, I was an avid Ben Heck-er, I made myself a portable from one of those Nintendo-on-a-chip/Plug and Play consoles, and also tried my hand at a SNES portable; the only issue I had was the time and energy it took to make the case!

Gone are the days of franken-casing, when I could design my own case on Fusion 360 and 3D print my own design. Using a digital caliper, I measured all the components I had bought, sketched them in Fusion and created a case around the sketches.

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From this, I printed the models on our fancy new printer, and tried initially did a fit test to make sure my measurements were right, also made sure the Pi Zero worked on my 3.5" screen.

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Seeing that everything worked, I then had to burn my image on to my SD card, and figure out how to gain audio out from the GPIO pin. There is a very handy article on Adafruit, which shows you how to get audio out from GPIO#18 using an alternative function on that pin: https://learn.adafruit.com/adding-basic ... -pwm-audio

After getting these working, I hard wired everything together and placed it all inside the case (this was the less time consuming part of the build surprisingly!).

N.B. The wiring was not the most tidy of wiring jobs

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Everything worked first time, which I am very surprised about!

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Few things I would change for next time:

- The video out is from one of those rubbish composite reversing screens, the quality is naff, but good enough for a first go. Next time, I would look at getting something which outputs better quality.

- The audio is not the greatest, it struggles with highs and lows.. I have seen people using USB Audio adaptors to get their sound, or even follow Adafruit's guide to creating a Low Pass Filter. But for the efforts of a first time, the audio works fine

- The image which I downloaded, does not have working roms for Arcade and Neo Geo, which is a slight bummer. Not to fear though as the Nintendo and Sega roms work great! And as I cannot remove my SD card now as the Pi is hot glued in place.. it will have to do

- I bought those rubber tactile switches and thought I would try them for the buttons.. I'm not a fan of them for the 4 circular buttons, however they work great on the shoulder buttons!


And there you have it!

Hope you've enjoyed having a nosey at my little project. I'd love to hear what you think and anything you would've done differently!

[cpeb]

Awesome build

[cpeb]

is it comfy to hold?

[moosepr]

saw this over on the retropie forum!! is that blue hot glue?

[LukeC]

is it comfy to hold?

Thanks man, it's very comfy. I have quite big hands and it fits nicely for me!

[LukeC]

saw this over on the retropie forum!! is that blue hot glue?

That's the one and yeah, only the best coloured hot glue in these parts!

[rodocop]

That's pretty awesome!

[Holydohnut]

That looks like a very good quality print. Which printer do you... Err... Your Dad, have?

[LukeC]

That looks like a very good quality print. Which printer do you... Err... Your Dad, have?

My printer... I mean my Dad's is a Flashforge Finder! £400 on Amazon, only prints in PLA but fantastic resolution and quality for a starter printer. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00ZBS86ZW/ ... szbXV9F5GH

[coryh83]

could you please post your f360 files.

Thanks

Great build and it very close to what I am working on.