Makeshifter DIY ArduBOY

So here's my Arduboy Clone which is made by editing one of my previous project's PCB.

As we all know, Arduboy is an Opensource GameBoy-like system that is based around Atmega32U4 MCU.

In this Instructables, I'm gonna show you guys how you can make your own Arduboy Clone with Arduino pro micro, few buttons, and an SSD1306 Display to play Retro games made by the ArduBoy community!

Let's get started!

• Arduino Pro Micro x 1
• Custom PCB
• Female Header pin
• OLED SSD1306
• Breadboard
• wires
• Buttons x 6 pc

Arduboy is a combination of MCU which is the Atmega32u4, pushbuttons, and its Display which is the SSD1306 OLED Display.

The great thing about Arduboy is its games, you can find more than 100 games for Arduboy in its community and the best part about those games is that they are open source and free.

For example, I'm using Catacombs of the damned! in this built which is made by James Howard. It's an FPS Style game in which we are in a dungeon and we have to navigate 10 floors of a randomly generated dungeon, we can fire magic fireballs and collect much loot as possible. Pretty Sweet Eh?

You can learn about ArduBoy from here briefly- https://community.arduboy.com/

In order to build my version of ArduBoy Clone, I first prepared a breadboard version which was based around the attached wiring configuration.

After setting up the Breadboard version, there's only one thing left to do for completing this project which was to make a custom PCB for this setup.
However, for this build, I choose to first use an existing PCB that I made last month for a similar Gameboy HID Project. Also, SSD1306 SPI Display is the most commonly used display in this project but SSD1306 I2C Display can also be used here. we only have to connect the SCL pin of the OLED display to D6 and SDA to D4. Before uploading the sketch, we can choose the type of display in the tool menu.

Previously, I've prepared a project which was this custom game controller.

It was based around Pro Micro board and have buttons so I took that PCB and cut down a few of its tracks and edited the whole board according to breadboard setup. For Direction buttons, I remove their previously laid tracks (by scoring the tracks with a paper cutter) and connected them with A3, A2, A1, and A0 in this order.

• A1 to Button Right
• A2 to Button Left
• A3 to Button Down
• A0 to Button UP

I did the same for the A and B buttons.

• 8 to Button B
• 7 to Button A

Then I place all the components in their assigned place and solder them one by one.

In the end, my ghetto Arduboy setup was complete.

For Installing the Arduboy package

• we have to copy its JSON URL and paste it in the Board manager URL in the preferences of Arduino IDE. (if you already have put another board's URL in it then use a comma between two URLs) https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MrBlinky/Arduboy...

• then we go to the board manager and search Arduboy in it and then install the Arduboy board package by MrBlinky
• Go to this link and download Catacombs of the damned!, extract its whole file in the Arduino Sketch folder which is in the Document>Arduino.
• Open the main sketch
• Select the right board along with the right display for your setup and hit upload.

Note- Just like I uploaded Catacombs of the damned! game into my setup, you can download and upload many games on your custom Arduboy.

https://community.arduboy.com/c/games/35 download your fav game from here and upload it on your Arduboy setup. The uploading process will remain same for all games.

Now, this above setup which I made isn't exactly a final version or even a permanent version. For making this setup better, I prepared Version 2.

Version 2 shape is the same as my previous game controller project's PCB but its layout is a bit different.

I designed its PCB in OrCad Cadance and exported its Gerber file. (Gerber data can be downloaded)
For now, this is it. Leave a comment if you Run into any problem, I'll help you out :)

Peace