Arduboy FX SP

Arduboy Homemade
#1

I wanted to make a arduboy with the SSD1309 2.42" screen but couldn’t think of a suitable form factor for it. I did notice that the screen was about the same size as the Gameboy Advance screen. I was going to put my homebrew arduboy in that but @bateske beat me too it, The next best thing was to use a Gameboy Advance SP instead.

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It has a flash chip and I uploaded the FX game bundle onto it. It charges over USB C. I used the power switch to turn it on and off and also added a mute switch to the volume slider. I used the d-pad and A and B buttons and put the reset button where the brightness button was. The start, select, L and R buttons are not used.

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I just wired the screen up with wires and snaked them through the hinge like the ribbon cable would normally do.

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I put the arduino, DC DC boost and flash chip in on the board in the space were the game cart would normally go and then made a cover with a magnet in it to cover them up. This means you can still upload new games easily.

All the board files and the 3d print files are available on my blog post

Youtube video below

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#2

Oooh that looks very nice! well done.

I see the transistor inverter isn’t working well whenever the flash chip is accessed in the menu. You may concider switching to using a single gate inverter chip (SN74LVC1G04) that will be a more reliable solution.

#3

Thanks, I was hoping someone more experienced would chime in on why it was doing that. I was the guy asking questions in this thread

I should probably should have gone with the suggested transistors but I only had 2n2222 on hand so went with that. Weirdly I had the same problem with my last arduboy build

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#4

I looked at your schematic on your website. I’m not sure if it’s just a mistake in your schematic or not. But in the schematic the base and emitter are swapped. ie the emitter should be the one connected to ground and the base should be connected to resistor R1.

If the transistor is connected the way is should. You could try to reduce the resistor values R1 and/or R2. I’m assuming from your parts list that both are 10K? Try using 470 Ohm to 1K for base and 1K to 4.7K for the collector resistor R2 .

I sugested using the single gate chip as that is a digital solution and doesn’t require fidling around finding the right transistor and resistor values.

#5

Noice! I saw this on twitter, I like it!

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#6

So I did swap the base and emitter because when I was bringing the board up I couldn’t get the screen to work so I had thought I had got it wrong so I flipped the transistor over and It started working. I then swapped it in the schematic. I was using 10k resistors, I might go back and have a play around to see if changing the transistor back and changing the resistor values works.

If I re-spin the board I might look into using the single gate inverter chip (SN74LVC1G04)

Thanks for the feed back, It is much appreciated