Twas the Night After Xmas

Not a creature was stirring in Micro Center, not even a mouse. So I went out and decided to throw caution to the wind and this is what happens. I “accidentally” buy a ton of random stuff from Micro Center! Here’s the breakdown:

Raspberry Pi Zero W
Raspberry Pi 3 B+
Raspberry Pi 7 inch Touchscreen Display
Raspberry Pi case for the touchscreen
Adafruit Powerboost 1000c
C4Labs RPI Zero case with built-in breadboard
Micro SD Card

Except for the powerboost, none of the other items really had a planned project. I guess I was in the xmas mood today 🤣. I needed the powerboost (because I fried the last one) to replace the battery pack I use on my retropie handheld because the custom switch I made was giving me a lot of grief. I spliced a two way switch on to a micro USB B wire that ended in a micro USB B female breakout. The switch was protected by shrink tubing which also made it very difficult to repair. The switch was prone to break because it would be turned on and off many times a day by an 11 year old (Know Thy User!). I guess the only notable thing on that build was that I had to mount the USB output port backwards on the other side of the board to make the footprint smaller.

I then added a push button switch and glued it to the back of the retro pie case. The Adafruit Powerboost 1000c has an enable pin that made this very easy to do. The powerboost also has charging capabilities (I guess thats what the c in 1000c stands for).

I then decided to take apart my barely started Evil Keyboard project (Adafruit Pro Trinket + Raspberry Pi Zero with a small OLED screen) and put it on the C4Labs case. This would give me a bigger breadboard to work with in case I want the Evil Keyboard to do more, errr, evil, I guess.

And finally the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with a 7 inch touchscreen. It was rather straightforward to put together. I wanted to buy the fancier smartipi case which allowed you to connect lego bricks for mounting a camera and other things. Of course I was too cheap to fork out the 30 bucks for it.

It looks real nice and as you would expect the touchscreen works. I installed a virtual keyboard called matchbox-keyboard and it surprisingly works better than expected (I had really really really low expectations that this would actually be a usable tablet to be honest 🤣). It takes up like half the screen but again, it is usable-ish. I was even able to play (more like launch and mindlessly walk around) minecraft on it. So now the real question that I ask myself whenever I make unscheduled trips to Micro Center. Why did I buy this?