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Created: 03/28/2017

ESP8266 Gameboy Dev Board

Your go to dev board for Gameboy accessories development, powered by ESP8266.

Prototype

Story

I wanted to create this board to solve 2 problems:

  1. To make my other project, ESP8266 Gameboy Printer, more slick looking and convenient to use.
  2. Easily test out Gameboy accessory ideas that I want to make, that also utilizes ESP8266.

I posted on Reddit /r/Gameboy about my ESP8266 Gameboy Printer Emulator project, and recieved tremendous comments. Which also confirmed that this device do sparks some interest.

I'm releasing this project under MIT License for both the board design and code.

The Board

Few weeks weeks ago I finally pull the trigger and designed the board then sent it to OSH Park to get it made. It came back yesterday so I tested it out. Unfortunately due to my carelessness there are some little problems. Too embarrassed to talk about it here.

But I got it all fixed up! And even added my own aesthetic touch to it! Here's a sneak peak! Cute eh?

Mockup

This can go straight on top of the Wemo D1 mini and I helpfully added an LED and a button to pull GPIO0 to ground.

Someone on Reddit also asked if it's possible to add SD card to this setup. With the Arduino framework, I can't see why not. You can pop this shield and get micro SD connection, but I've already used D5-D7 on my board. Maybe you have to wire one yourself.

Potentials

Not only you can emulate a Gameboy Printer, there are a lot of things you can emulate as well! Such as another Gameboy. Another project I have in mind is like so:

A Pokemon creation device. You input all the specs of a Pokemon, the device creates the Pokemon and can be traded with real Gameboys! Further more, one can even use it to "store" a Pokemon as a file, you can put it on the cloud, you can duplicate it, or even create a web service to trade Pokemons!! The Pokemon link protocol of gen 1 and 2 games are fairly open right now, so theoretically you can achieve this (in fact, someone already did)!

Conclusion

I've submitted the new board to the fab house, again. Hopefully this time there will be no more design problems.

I'll upload the EagleCAD design files to Github shortly.

Update

And here's the Github Repo!