Maker and classic computing fanatic Peter Khouly has designed a homage to Nintendo’s basic Recreation Boy household of handheld consoles, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2350B and with retro gaming in thoughts — although equally at dwelling as a general-purpose all-in-one growth board: the Pico Pal.
“Though Pico Pal has a retro design, it’s constructed to be forward-looking,” Khouly says of his creation. “Whether or not you are a hacker, developer, or artistic tinkerer, Pico Pal is a flexible platform for a variety of makes use of. After all, its backlit show and basic D-pad make it nice for some retro emulation on the go, however its array of I/O [Inputs/Outputs] and highly effective microcontrollers can allow you to use it as a common distant management, pedometer, or perhaps a moveable music participant. After all, it is nice for safety pentesting — spoof Bluetooth or USB HID inputs, run keystroke and Wi-Fi deauth assaults, with a tool that is stealthy and unassuming. Lastly, Pico Pal is a flexible devkit for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. Its glorious collection of ports and SPI/I2C compatibility make it an important battery-powered testbed for real-world makes use of.”
The Recreation Boy-styled Pico Pal is constructed round Raspberry Pi’s newest RP2350B microcontroller, giving it two Arm Cortex-M33 cores and two free and open supply Hazard3 RISC-V cores all operating at 150MHz, of which the consumer can choose any two cores to be operating directly, plus 520kB of static (SRAM). To this, Khouly has added 16MB of flash storage plus a secondary community controller: an Espressif ESP32, offering Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity together with 4MB of its personal devoted flash.
The whole lot is housed in a clear handheld case, which incorporates two hearth buttons, a directional pad, plus begin and choose buttons, situated beneath a 2.6″ square-format 320×320 decision full-color IPS show. There is a USB Kind-C connector for programming and to cost a 1,500mAh battery, help for HDMI-compatible DVI video output with a USB dock, an infrared transceiver, real-time clock (RTC), stereo audio system with headphone output, and microSD card storage with a bundled 16GB card — plus, for these trying so as to add just a little movement into their initiatives, an STMicroelectronics LSM6DSO32 inertial measurement unit (IMU).
The hand-held consists of Recreation Boy-style controls, a USB-charged battery, and built-in IMU plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. (📷: Khouly Computer systems)
Naturally, an enormous focus of the undertaking is on retro gaming — together with the flexibility to emulate Nintendo’s Recreation Boy household of consoles — however Khouly can also be positioning the platform as ideally suited for general-purpose Raspberry Pi RP2350 growth. To additional that, the schematics, a full invoice of supplies, and firmware supply code have all been revealed beneath an unspecified open-source license.
Khouly is planning to launch a crowdfunding marketing campaign for the Pico Pal within the close to future, with events invited to enroll on Crowd Provide to be notified when the marketing campaign goes reside; hyperlinks to the schematics and supply code can be found on the marketing campaign web page.
