Raspberry Pi Fallout Terminal PC -- Episode 373

I’ve been working on my own. Not having a 3D printer I had the parts printed by a local shop in the colours I wanted them. The print is exactly the same as yours, but I’m still collecting hardware and deciding what I want in there. I want it to have more utility than just the hacking game (such as running pico-8 games), so I’m making some hardware changes.

Here the are the main differences with my plan:

• Pi Zero, for cost reasons
• no trinket, since it won’t be interfaced with a PC
• power will be provided from a panel mount micro USB cable from the hole designed for the trinket (still have to figure out how I’m going to get that physically connected), and will probably have to widen the hole where the trinket was intended to be to make room for that panel mount, and drill screw holes to mount it
• I reamed out the power jack hole in the back to fit a smaller power button
• instead of the key caps from the print I’m going to make an 8x2 USB keyboard to fit in the spot, based off of this C64 keyboard hack and using an atmega8 I’ve had lying around for over a decade, and these switches
• The keyboard will cost a fair bit extra, but it’s a good project on its own

Other than those changes I’m going to stick to the original design.

Very cool, James!

I'm excited to see your take on it. Do you have any photos of your build so far?

This is the only decent shot I’ve got at the moment. The case still needs some sanding. It doesn’t show up very well in the photo, but the vent is a metallic grey. I also debated whether or not I should leave the washers on with the screws. And the Pi Zero is half visible there.

Another difference, I’ll be using a cobbler to break out the pins from the back of the display. I’ll still need to deal with the I2C pins that the speaker phat uses, but I believe the additional pins are brought out as pads on the back of the display.

I’ll take some more pics of the case tomorrow, although there’s not much new there. I think I wrecked either the Pi or the on/off shim while soldering them together, since when I connect power absolutely nothing happens. My guess is the shim board didn’t take kindly to the rough treatment it got as I was trying to get it flush with the Pi’s pin header. My soldering skills are not great. I’m a software developer by trade. I’ve got a fork of the hacking game and I made a pull request to your repo for some of my changes.

When I realized that curses on Windows isn’t up to the task of properly displaying essential parts of the game I also started working on a platform abstraction to offer either curses or tcod as the display library. It also abstracts input, because I was considering having a gpio based input on the Pi, or just standard input if that’s not available.

So I guess there is more to show, it’s just not hardware.

And I can’t find the implementation of the hacking game that works inside my RobCo OS system, so I must just have it locally. I’ll figure that out at some point.

Thinking further on this, if I use small snap-dome switches and a silicone membrane I can fit a QWERTY keyboard into the space for the keyboard. Granted, the keys would be small, but it'd have decent tactile feedback and let me use the terminal fully.

Also, I'd definitely need to get this assembled by whoever makes the PCB, as it'd all need to be small, SMT parts.

Also, I'd definitely need to get this assembled by whoever makes the PCB, as it'd all need to be small, SMT parts.