“I designed a PCB that uses a Teensy, an LCD screen, joystick, buttons, battery and speaker to create a GameBoy-like gaming system!
Berry Racer is a game that I came up with and programmed using Arduino’s software. The game is run on a Teensy microcontroller which is connected through a custom PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to a screen, a joystick, four buttons, and a piezo speaker. The board can be powered through the micro USB port on the Teensy or with a battery that can be plugged into the back of the PCB, there is also a switch to turn the circuit off when running on battery power. This device and program was designed and built by me with the help of Zane Cochran who was the instructor of the CRT 420 - Special Topics Course at Berry College for the Creative Technologies major.
This tutorial will go into detail about how to build a GamePad like this one, however, I hope it is also helpful in case you want to build something slightly different. The video that is linked to this intro slide covers the entire build process as well as some of the programming steps that I took, however it does not go into a lot of details about programming. I try to explain why or how I am doing the things that I am doing and in the end, I criticize my shortcomings on this project, I definitely am proud of what I was able to accomplish with this project but there are so many more things that I want to improve in the future. Let me know if you would like to see a version 2 and what improvements you would make! But for this tutorial, I will detail the steps I took to accomplish this version 1 GamePad.
The following is a brief overview of the design process and provides all necessary links to the components/equipment/software that is required and will act sort of like your Bill of Materials. Read through the entire thing and figure out what components and/or software you might need.
To begin, I figured out what Game I would make and what I wanted my GamePad to look like. You will need to use Inkscape to create a DXF file for the outline of the board. I then used easyEDA to design the board based on that outline and once I was happy with the board, I ordered the boards to be manufactured. Below is the list of components that I used on the board.”