RetroPie made from old NES #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
[snoius] posted picture of his awesome Raspberry Pi project on imgur. Very cool project! Via Hack a Day.
I started with an old (and filthy) NES I picked up off of eBay for $10. It didn’t come with the power or video cables so I couldn’t check to see if it worked. Although I was ginger with the disassembly process so the board is intact.
The heart of the build, a Raspberry Pi Revision B board. I picked up a case for it along with a 8GB SD card, and I just added an Edimax micro WiFi USB dongle.
POWER:
I used the original power button as a pass-through switch for the system. I have a short micro-USB going from the rear of the case to the RPi, but I route the +5V line through the switch so I can control the power.
LED:
Secondily, you can see two wires (one with a heat-shrink contained 330ohm resistor) soldered to the LED. These lead to the +3.3V and Ground GPIO headers on the RPi.
NOTCH:
The last modification, is a small notch cut into the board directly under the NES SW-02 marking. The LED and Reset switch share a common path, which would cause issues later when I added the reset switch so I preemptively severed the connection.
CONTROLLER PORTS:
I opted to use the original NES controller ports to house the USB connections. Using a saw I flushed the back of the ports to have a flat surface, and then using a utility knife I carved out a cavity to fit the female connection. I soldered a male cable to each so that they can be connected to a USB hub mounted to the interior of the top half of the case.
MOUNTING PLATE:
The mounting plate for the power and HDMI is a block of Aspen wood that I had around that has been notched to accommodate the different sized plugs. There is a matching piece which screws down on top of this piece to give it a firm footing. The bottom block is secured with a high grade foam tape.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!