Introduction

This project was the origin of my interest in the embedded world and was my first PCB. The goal of the project was to learn more about developing custom hardware and firmware from scratch and leaned on the Arduino development infastructure. The result is a battery powered handheld console with two games implemented, pong and brick breaker.

Design

The design of this project is relatively straight forward centering around the popular ATMEGA 328p microcontroller (same as the Arduino UNO). Included in the design is also the hardware to use and charge a single cell lithium-ion coin cell. This hardware includes the battery charging circuit, linear regulator, power switch, and a USB-micro connector. The console's display is a small I2C OLED breakout board that is soldered to the main PCB and four user buttons are included on the front to play the games.

Firmware

The firmware for this project was developed in the Arduino IDE to leverage it's existing display and hardware abstraction libraries with all other firmware being written by hand. The gameplay firmware was most of the development work.