Repurposing outdated electronics is a favourite pastime of {hardware} hackers. In spite of everything, simply because an outdated gadget is not helpful for its meant objective doesn’t imply that it could not be helpful for another objective. Plenty of moveable electronics from the previous 15 years or so have been changed by the smartphones that we now all carry round, so there are loads of GPS models, MP3 gamers, digital cameras, and extra which can be accumulating in thrift shops and landfills in every single place.
These once-hot objects can now be had for pennies on the greenback (or by rifling by your spare elements drawers), so they’re an ideal place to begin for passion initiatives. Russell Tabata occurred to have an outdated iPod from 2004 laying round that had not seen any use for a really very long time. The shape issue of an iPod appears to be like an terrible lot like a handheld gaming system, so Tabata determined to show it right into a mash-up of traditional Apple and Nintendo merchandise. The outcome — an Apple Sport Boy.
That is truly fairly a easy factor to do. The open-source Rockbox undertaking supplies customized firmware for a lot of outdated digital music gamers, together with many iPod fashions. And this firmware already features a Sport Boy emulator. Flash the firmware, and the job is completed. Or at the very least that’s one possibility, however it proved to be too uninteresting of an possibility for Tabata. For that purpose, and since he needed to have the choice to run further emulators as properly, he tore the iPod aside and utterly gutted it.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (📷: Nick Bild)
Out with the outdated, and in with the brand new was the theme of this construct. The inner elements had been changed with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Waveshare 320 x 240 pixel LCD show wired into its GPIO pins. Don’t fear — the press wheel remained practical by attaching the FPC cable to a breakout board that made it simple to attach it to the Raspberry Pi. A 350 mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery was included to energy the gadget, in addition to an Adafruit PowerBoost 1000 Fundamental for charging.
A Raspberry Pi OS Lite picture containing RetroPie was written to an SD card and inserted into the Raspberry Pi. Code from the present ipodrpi undertaking, which interfaces a click on wheel with a Raspberry Pi, was barely modified to extend the variety of out there buttons that can be utilized with the gadget. To complete off the construct, a customized Apple Sport Boy startup animation was created, which each Apple and Nintendo are certain to be thrilled about.
The outcome positively appears to be like nice, and it’s a good solution to reuse an outdated gadget — even when it is just the case that’s being reused. It’s laborious to think about that the gameplay expertise is excellent, nonetheless. Click on wheels are nice for navigating menus and controlling the playback of music, however had been probably not meant for gaming. There’s simply the one button within the center, which is in a clumsy place, and to simulate different button presses combos are wanted, like resting a finger on a selected phase of the wheel earlier than clicking the button.
If in case you have a useless iPod, Tabata’s hack might be an effective way to deliver it again to life. But when your iPod remains to be buzzing alongside wonderful, you could be higher off trying into Rockbox firmware.