Han's NintendoPi Project

[hansolo77]

As promised... the final hardware aspect of my NintendoPi project is complete!

When I started my project, I didn't know where it would take me or how long it would indeed take.  I've given up counting the days.  There were days of nothing, then days of a lot of stuff happening all once.  My original goal of putting a Pi inside a Nintendo case was simple enough.  It grew though, and is now a monstrous beast!

Spoiler

Here she is, all opened up.  It's a mess, and I cleaned it up best I could with some cable ties.  Looks a lot better than it did, I'll tell you that!

Spoiler

Here is a closer look at the top of the case.  I purchased and mounted a Noctua fan (link) to the top of the case to vent out hot air to try and keep the system cool.  It does it's job well, and Noctua is world famous for their super low noise levels.  It is mounted via the supplied rubber mounting hardware, which I hot-glued to the case to eliminate the need to drill more holes and mount legit screws.  It works great.  To the right of that is a Mayflash Sega/Atari to USB adapter (link).  Prior to mounting it (again via hot-glue to keep screw holes less visible) I fully tested it with RetroPie and confirmed it works.  Both ports work, and they both work with Sega 6-button controllers AND Atari Joysticks.  The plugs are wired via 18 female to female jumper wires (link) to the front of the case.  I dremeled out 2 holes for the DB9 plugs (link) and did a piss-poor job at it.  The problem was, there are 2 layers of plastic.  The black top layer and then the gray under-layer.  I had to go through both layers and have them both match up.  Once I had it all holed out and the plugs hot glued, I couldn't get the wired hooked up to their respective pins due to their location.  After using a razor blade and cutting/tearing the glue out, I was left with only 3 plugs to use (removing the glue destroyed the plugs).  I tried to wire the plugs up the 2nd time BEFORE gluing them into the case.  That worked better, but the pins on the external plugs were larger than the ones on the Mayflash, and I had a really hard time getting them on.  I even tried doing a solder job, but that was even worse.  So after a day or 2 of taking a break, I went back at it, did it slowly, and finally got everything working.  I re-tested the connections to make sure they all worked, before finally installing them to the front of the case with glue.  Because it was such an ordeal, I glued all the wires in place too, hoping they'll never get unplugged.  The big black thing is where the cartridge door is. I tried to shop around at 3 different Hobby shops, and couldn't come up with some nice plastic to use like Stigzler suggested here (link) but I did come up with some really nice heavy card stock for about a buck.  I measured and cut sheets, then used some quick and easy electrical tape (since it's black) and formed them into a box.  Then I used hot glue to hold them together, then used more electrical tape to seal all the holes (so no light got through).  Then I used more hot glue to just mount the box onto the case.  On the back of the box, I cut out the 4 plugs needed for the USB hub (power, USB in, and 2 USB out).  The Mayflash adapter is connected to one of the USB outs, so I didn't have a lot of wires running between the bottom and top of the case.  In the future if I feel gutsy, I might cut the plug off and shorten the cable so it's not 3 feet long tied up in a cable tie.  But that's it for the top of the case.

Spoiler

Here's a closer view of the inside of the case.  On the left we have the WD Passport Ultra HD.  It is connected to the bottom left USB port on the Pi.  No additional hardware required for that, gets it's power through the USB.  The HD holds the ROMs (including many cd-images for PlayStation and SegaCD).  Next we have the power.  As shown previously, I have essentially cannibalized a $1.50 3-port extension cord plug and mounted it directly to an externally mounted C14 power plug (link).  Since I'm not good with electronics, I wasn't sure if splicing together multiple power cables to 1 adapter was a good idea, so I went this route.  I probably could have saved precious space and heat had I spliced them together, but oh well.  The left power adapter is for the Pi, and the right power adapter is for the USB Hub.  Next to that I have the externally mounted HDMI cable (link) which "works" but I'm not happy with.  You'll see why in the following images.  For the left over holes that housed the original power converter and audio/video plugs, I simply used more of my black heavy card stock and made a simple cover.  I don't care how it looks inside, but outside it looks great.  Rounding around the corner, we have the wires for the front switches.  These are all working.  Power turns the system on/off, reset exists a game, and the LED (modified to BLUE!) glows when there is power to the system (not when there is power to the switch but rather the Pi itself).  The wires attached to the GPIO headers are the FAN (connected to +5v and gnd), the LED (connected to +3v and gnd), the RESET switch, and the in/out for the Mausberry switch to control power.  Connected to the Pi's USB ports are the USB hub (top left), wireless keyboard/mouse dongle (top right), HD (bottom left) and the Raphnet Nintendo->USB adapter (bottom right).  Speaking of which, the original Nintendo controller ports were wired up essentially the same way as the Mayflash was, with wires running to the pins, and then to their adapter counterparts.  Everything works.

Spoiler

Here we have the outside front of the case.  For the most part, I think the 2 DB9 plugs look fine.  They're functional, and that's what's important.  The various scratches you see around the case are just bits of cat hair.  Aside from those plugs, you'd have no idea this wasn't a real Nintendo, until you opened up the cartridge slot!

Spoiler

Now you can see the work paid off for that black box I made!  It houses the USB hub (which I have hot glued to the box to make sure it doesn't slide around.  I thought about getting some more screws and nuts, but that would require taking the hub apart and I couldn't figure out how to do that.  This works for me, and it looks really REALLY good!  This is actually my favorite part of the case mod.  It's too bad I couldn't get a better picture of it.  With the way I have the box mounted inside the case, you can actually push on the box, and it doesn't give.  It's not simple card stock.  It's heavy duty stuff about 5mm thick (if you consider a centimeter is 10mm which is pretty much the smallest measurement most of us American's are familiar with lol!).  If you're at all familiar with comic book backing boards, it's about 4-5 of them stacked, or maybe 10 notecards?  Good stuff.  And with the hot glue, it's keeping it in place really well.  You can plug and unplug cables to the HUB without any issue (a concern I was having initially).  Couldn't be happier!

Spoiler

Here is a somewhat better view of the outside of the case where the original power and a/v plugs were that I have covered.  Nothing crazy here, just some covered up holes.  But because of the quality of the card stock I got, and the sturdiness of the hot glue, that thing is SOLID, and not going anywhere!  You can also get a pretty quick look at my crappy dremeling I did for the HDMI and Power plugs....

Spoiler

And here's the sad looking back side of the case.  It's stuff like this that makes me 2nd guess my thoughts on doing this.  The C14 power plug doesn't look too awfully bad, but that HDMI is just a total disaster.  What happened with that was just crazy.  I lined it up, and marked where to cut.  Then I started cutting but soon discovered I had it in the wrong place from the INSIDE.  There is a screw mounting pole in there, that holes the case together.  It wasn't a pole to hold the original motherboard or anything like that, it was a necessary post.  So I had to move the hole more to the left.  My 2nd set of cuts was TOO far left.  It started looking like I'd never even be able to get the screws mounted.  Now that I'm looking at it, I wonder if I could have mounted it from the outside instead of the inside.  I'll have to double check and make sure I didn't hot glue AND screw it into place.  If I didn't, maybe I can fix it and it won't look so bad.  The scuff under the plug is unfixable though, unless I can get somebody with some plastic knowledge to fill me in on filling in the hole.  

So that's my hardware.  I put it into spoilers so that each photo can have it's own little details with it and help not get confusing.  Let's take a look at my original roadmap and see what I still have to do:

• Obtain an NES (ordered waiting for delivery)
• Obtain an RPi3 (and necessary components like power, HDMI, SD card)
• Obtain power switch circuit
• Obtain external USB powered hard drive
• Decide on classic controllers or rewire reset switch for Xbox controllers (now that I've thought about it, probably use a HUB)
• Decide on re-using pre-existing power connector
• Decide on re-using pre-existing RCA plugs

Alright.. so NES is done.  RPi3 is done.  Power switch Circuit is done.  USB Powered Hard Drive is done.  Decided on classic controllers.  Decided to not use pre-existing power connectors and plugs. 

All that's left is fine tuning the software, adding more games and systems.  All the hardware works, and works well with original controllers.  I even have a keyboard and mouse to play text games, or FPS ports like Quake.  Configuring those ports to use the keyboard/mouse is being a pain though (like Duke Nukem 3D is totally kicking my butt).  But I'd say I'm 98% there.  I have some metadata scraping to do still, and I'd like to find a better way to emulate Atari 800 and Atari ST games, as the current method sucks.

 

[tthurman]

Man that's a lot under the hood, good job!

As for the HDMI thing, if it bothers you that much look for a cheap hdmi wall plate, and cut a nice clean cover for it.

 

[stigzler]

That's awesome, Hans. You've done a cracking job. That USB hub mounting's great.

I know how it feels to have one bit not come out right though. I think you can remedy the hdmi. Use one of these:

http://www.cliffuk.co.uk/products/feedthrough/plastic/index.htm

And either front or rear mount it. You can use car filler to fix that plastic if there's any bits peeking through (you guys have 'Bondo' over there?)

Think I posted earlier on the bit tho get to make mounting these XLR passthroughs really easy!

 

[hansolo77]

Thanks.  I'm having a new crisis now though...  my controls are all out of whack.  I had everything mapped correctly before, and have a backup image of the working SD card.  But now it's not working.  All I did was add 2 new systems and scrape them.  But I must have done something else too at some point.  I've lost the ability to control every system with every controller.  I can work inside RetroArch just fine, and ES, just fine, but when emulation is running I got nothing.  I can't even use the keyboard.  Back to the drawing board.  All I wanted to do was play some Metroid.  Uhg.

[stigzler]

Is that the RA settings? 

[Kustom Kid]

Nice work. To go along with tthurman's suggestion maybe you can use a Keystone Jack to clean that HDMI hole up a bit.

[hansolo77]

18 hours ago, stigzler said:

Is that the RA settings? 

Not sure what you mean.  I think the problem came from when I was trying to get the wireless keyboard/mouse dongle to associate with the Duke Nukem port.  That was the last thing I installed since it was working correctly.  When I rewrote the last SD card image prior and made some copies of the WORKING config.  I then rewote the most recent image and copied the WORKING configs in.  That fixed everything else, but now Duke's not working.  But I fixed it, so I'm back to running status.  It's just a matter of time till I crack it. 

[hansolo77]

18 hours ago, stigzler said:

Is that the RA settings? 

Not sure what you mean.  The way the system works, you configure the controller inside EmulationStation.  After that, RetroPie goes to work and creates custom controller configs for each system and each controller.  When RetroArch is then launched via EmulationStation, it automatically picks up the controller mapping.  I think the problem came from when I was trying to get the wireless keyboard/mouse dongle to associate with the Duke Nukem port.  That was the last thing I installed since it was working correctly.  The port doesn't use the LibRetro system, so RetroArch isn't involved which makes configuring controls that much more difficult.  Yesterday, I started by making a new SD card image with the current (non-working) settings.  I then rewrote the last SD card image prior and made some copies of the WORKING config files.  I then rewote the most recent image and copied the WORKING configs in.  That fixed everything else, but now Duke's not working.  So I'm back to running status.  It's just a matter of time till I crack it.   

7 hours ago, Kustom Kid said:

Nice work. To go along with tthurman's suggestion maybe you can use a Keystone Jack to clean that HDMI hole up a bit.

I'm ok with it.  I don't want to have to sink any more money or time into the hardware.  I took a look and I think I can change the orientation of the plug and have it on the outside of the case like I did the C14.  That was my original plan, I'm not sure why I mounted the whole thing internally.  The only difficulty I'll have is getting access to the nuts holding the screws in place.  I installed the screws before I had the USB hub.  When I did the modification to the adapter for the hub (cutting the plug off so I could mount it horizontally instead of verticaly) I actually hot glued the adapter down to the bottom of the case.  I'll have to see if there is enough room to get some needlenose pliers onto the nut behind it.  If not, I'm not going to worry about it.

[RIP-Felix]

I just found this while searching for a way to make use of the rPi's I2C connection. I'm looking into using the existing proprietary port on a NES classic edition (if and when I can ever get one) for the.the rPi. It streamlines the Power LED, Graceful shutdown Switch, and allows for (S)NES/Arcade controls to be connected directly to it. 1 tiny Board to do everything. Would work great for a Super NintendoPi (Hmm...) All the code is open source too, if I can ever figure out how to infuse it into my Arduino, maybe I could it on my Mini NES.