After messing with ABS for a long time, I finally decided to switch back to using PLA. But more about this in an upcoming blog post. My first project using PLA again was to print the outside of a gameboy, to go with a wonderful gameboy kit from Adafruit.
I bought this kit on an impulse, and while building it was a nice experience and I still like it a lot, I thought I would write down some minor issues that I've had with it, and that I would have liked to know about in advance.
- it doesn't come with a built-in speaker, or with basic instructions how to add one. they do sell components for this at adafruit, but I would have liked some hand holding.
- it doesn't come with a suitable SD card, which would have been nice, as a normal SD sticks out almost 2 centimeters. adafruit actually sells "half-size" SD cards.
- the tutorial describes the needed screws using non-metric standards, and it would have been nice if these could also be easily ordered.
- two pins on the LCD screen connector were sloppily soldered and actually making contact with each other.
- finally, the software (taken from their "cupcade" project) does not include a gameboy emulator by default! I really would have liked to play the original tetris on this thing (and with a speaker)
While I could have used my SNES controller model on thingiverse to print the buttons, and possibly even the elastomers using flexible filament, I really was in a bit of a hurry (possibly also explaining some of my complaints above), so I just used the fake SNES controller from adafruit.
