BornHack 2022's Badge Is a CircuitPython Gaming Machine Powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040

BornHack, the week-long campsite gathering for temporarily tent-dwelling hackers and makers congregating in Demark's Funen, takes place this August — and its badge design has been unveiled: a handheld games console, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller.

"With this badge we are putting the focus on games. With the shape of a small controller and a color LCD screen in the middle it's ready for a bunch of interesting homebrew games," says Thomas Flummer of the open-hardware badge design — a PCB that roughly mimics the shape of a Sony Dualshock controller. "This badge uses the RP2040 dual-core [Arm] Cortex M0+ microcontroller from Raspberry Pi and has 16MB of Quad SPI flash for code and probably also a bit of media files."

In addition to the full color portrait-orientation display in the middle of the badge and a preloaded copy of CircuitPython, the "Game On" design includes a USB Type-C connector for data and power, an SAO v1.96bis connector for add-on boards, and a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for external I2C devices. Four buttons, marked A, B, X, and Y, are positioned to the right-hand side — but where you might expect a thumbstick or D-pad on the left is a series of bare copper pads.

"There is a prototyping area on the left side," Flummer explains, "maybe for a custom joystick, a pressure sensitive e-textile sensor or something else that works with your game. To interface with the RP2040, there are a few I/O [Input/Output] hookup points along the edge that support either crocodile test leads, conductive thread, or regular wire soldered down, depending on what you are making."

Those general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectors offer digital input and output and analog input capabilities, with an additional two pins available on the SAO connector should a project need more. M3-sized mounting holes offer the possibility for robustly-connected expansion boards, while the Hardware Hacking Tent at the event itself will have compatible prototyping boards and a selection of components available for experimentation.

The board design files, created in KiCad v6, are available on the BornHack GitHub repository now under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license; more details on the seventh annual BornHack itself, which runs from August 3-10, 2022, are available on the event website.