Sometimes we see a thread in our technical support forums that makes us happy inside – like this one from forums user njgsx96 detailing their Raspberry Pi Game Gear build. With help from our tech support engineers the project is up and running. Nice work all around!

I wanted to update my thread here. As I mentioned earlier, I decided to not go with the Pi 3 and went with a Pi 2. I actually had some issues that I ran into and ended up taking apart the whole thing and taking a 2 week break. I was able to return last week, renewed and in full force. I de-soldered the USBs and the LAN. Even though I scraped the lining inside as best I could, I sprayed the inside of the case with a rubberized paint as well for good measure. I dropped the capacitive buttons for 12mm tactile buttons and in the process of soldering the stock buttons, the pads came off so I went the copper tape route for all of the buttons. I had some button bounce but changing the capacitive pads, spacing the copper a little more and adding a delay in the teensy code seems to have fixed it and they work well. Also I hogged out the inside a bit more to fit a 4400Mah battery. I was able to assemble it and get it all loaded this weekend and overall I love this thing! So much fun and so much better than I could have imagined. It came with some lessons learned though, like…

• Learning Arduino is hard
• Take your time
• Plan everything, solder, test and assemble, in that order!
• Don’t use crazy glue on the Game Gear case – it ruins everything it comes in contact with!
• A cig punch cuts the perfect hole in rubber to fit over a 12mm tactile button
• If you don’t think you can do it, try anyway!
• Always buy extra parts – if you don’t need them, someone you know might!

I learned a lot more of course but those are some quick ones. I maybe even have some changes if I am to make another, although I want to try my hand at a Pi Zero Gameboy next. Already have the parts!

Huge thanks to this forum and others and to Adafruit for providing amazing parts, service and direction!

Read the full thread here!

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