EMES - Epic Minimalist Entertainment System

Designed the housing

It needs some improvements, but overall it turned out pretty ok

I assembled the new base-board featuring the new LED matrix. As the previous one, it also has 4 buttons and a speaker.

Made a silly mistake in the schematics, so had to bodge the LED matrix driver chip a little. Oh well...

Also assembled the power-supply board, it has a tiny 90mAh Li-Ion battery on it, a boost converter and a charging controller which is connected to a power-only USB-C port.

The boards have the exact same dimensions and intended to be on top of each other inside a housing, which I'm going to design and print next. Both assembled boards seem to work fine.

In the meantime, I coded a new game - essentially a clone of the Nintendo Game & Watch Egg game.

I decided to experiment with my own custom-made LED matrix display, since the GPD340 display is basically pure high-grade unobtanium, and 10x7 resolution is very limiting for gaming capabilities.

So I designed a 15x10 matrix out of 0201 LEDs:

The resulting dimensions of the display area is 15 by 10mm with diagonal of ~0.7''.

I tried SMT-assembly service from one of the very well known PCB manufacturers for the first time ever, and gotta say the result totally exceeded my expectations: 

No defects whatsoever, every single LED on every matrix I received works.

To drive the matrix I chose the IS31FL3743A LED driver which is controlled through I2C bus and is 5V tolerant. I also designed a breadboard- friendly module for experimenting purposes. The module features both the driver and the matrix with just power and I2C pins being exposed.

I evaluated this module (if it even works as intended) using a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Of course, made an obligatory BadApple demo:

After I played enough with it on Pico, I hooked it up to my original ATiny10-EMES proto-breadboard and started rewriting previous games/demos for the new display.

So far, I have Pong and Snake and almost completed Tetris-like:

Next up is to assemble a new main PCB with integrated LED matrix and its driver.

A playable Snake-game has been implemented. Short playthrough: