A Homebrew Arduboy with a Removable Flash Cartridge

At its heart, the Arduboy is a small and affordable handheld video game console for retro-style gaming. But it’s also open source and based on Arduino, which makes it endlessly hackable. You can purchase a very nice prebuilt Arduboy, but you can also make your own. All of the files and information needed to do so are available online, and you can customize the design however you like. That’s what FacelessTech decided to do with their homebrew Arduboy that features a removable flash cartridge.

Unlike the Arduboy you can buy online, this homebrew version looks, well, homebrew. It’s larger in every dimension, and definitely doesn’t have the same level of polish. But it’s also custom, and FacelessTech was able to modify the original design to fit his needs. Most of the components are upgraded as well, including the buttons. Most interestingly, it also has the ability to load games from a separate flash cart. That feature is supported by the Arduboy software, but isn’t present on the standard Arduboy model.

FacelessTech built this homebrew Arduboy using a PCB sandwich design. The top PCB contains an Arduino Pro Micro, soft touch control buttons, an SMD piezo speaker, and a 0.96” 128x64 OLED display with the common SSD1306 driver and connected through SPI. The bottom PCB has a TP4056 LiPo charging board and a TXB0104 voltage level shifter. The flash cart is based on the standard community design, and uses the “Cathy 3k” bootloader. While the finished homebrew console doesn’t have the professional look of the standard Arduboy, it does offer the satisfaction of a homemade device and can be customized as much as FacelessTech likes.