Yobo NOAC Nintendo Portable "How Small Can it Be?" -- Episode 336

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Ben makes a Yobo portable that accepts NES cartridges. Yobo is a brand of Nintendo clones. They are essentially Nintendos on a chip, glop tops on a circuit board, and it is basically a clone of Nintendo systems. The goal is to make a Yobo portable that is about the size of an NES cartridge

Yobo is a brand of Nintendo clones. They are essentially Nintendos on a chip, glop tops on a circuit board, and it is basically a clone of Nintendo systems. Ben found one of these in a junk pile for $5 and as it turns out it works. He was thinking they could hack it up and use the parts to try to make a really small Nintendo clone. He wants to make it so it’s about the size of an NES cartridge. It will be more than an emulator, it will accept NES cartridges.

Ben starts on the case design using Fusion 360. He’s got the PCB mostly done. Ben noticed an issue when they do their laser paint. It’s hard to get the copper out from between traces so he went into design rule check. This is a file that indicates what tolerances the board house will accept. You can check your design against it. Once that’s taken care of the PCB is mostly done. He’ll still need to add a capacitor for the audio amplifier though. He’s using through –hole on some these parts to use up parts on hand (audio amp and controller shift register). Ben continues to fine-tune the design in Illustrator. The final design will use the same type of flat Li-po batter as the Raspberry Pi No HDMI project. Ben laser prints the front panel. He 3d prints parts with Makergear M2 and the old Replicator 1. Felix works on the PCB while Ben works on the screen. Ben always laser paints at the laser’s top resolution of 1200 DPI, even though it’s pretty slow. Meanwhile, Felix uses a scrubbing technique with the PCB to make the copper dissolve faster. Ben uses a digital potentiometer with pushbuttons for the volume control as there’s no room for a physical knob or dial.

Felix walks through the printer configuration. He’s installed Kamikaze and is familiarizing himself with OctoPrint. He makes some adjustments to the configuration file. He adds two more limit switches, allowing him to ignore the bed dimensions. Next, he figures out the device tree overlay to get the Atari 2600 joystick working. Ben admires the finished build.

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