Get Your Super Mario Fix in Steampunk Style!

Jiří Praus is a regular occurrence on the pages of electronics Twitter, and of course, Hackster, due to his incredible ability to construct beautiful, functional freeform circuits that have come to be known as circuit sculpture.

He's been featured on our pages before with his ever-blooming tulip — a beautiful blend of freeform brass rod circuit construction and mechanical design, which shows what is possible when you think outside of the bounding box of a PCB layout.

Praus is back again, and this time, he's stepped it up a notch with his fully functional take on the timeless classic of the Nintendo Game Boy Color, realized as a steampunk, full metal jacket homage to the ubiquitous invention of Gunpei Yokoi.

Under the hood, Praus has taken a similar approach to the internals as many of us would. With only three major components, it's a simple BoM — and with those parts being integrated development boards and modules, the wiring is simple too, and that's something to keep in mind when your point-to-point wiring is more point-to-point scaffolding!

From left to right:

• A ESP32, in the form of a LilyGo TTGO T8 dev board
• A 320x240 QVGA LCD display module
• A 2.5W D Class Amp, in the form of a PAM8320A module

That's pretty much all it takes to pull off a handheld gaming console these days — we're so spoiled!

While these parts might be humble in themselves, the enclosure in which the have been mounted is anything but!

The art here really is in the construction, with the components encaged in a criss cross of formed brass rod connections. The circuit is plainly visible below, and could even pass as a Fritzing diagram; yet this level of elegance is only achieved with some forethought on how to lay things out, including optimized GPIO assignment on the ESP32 board, or how to safely insulate the junctions of crossing wires.

Dead bug Donkey Kong? Or Mario, Manhattan style?

While the material selection might cause a double take, it's worth pointing out that this is a pretty valid construction method for a circuit. This technique isn't too far removed from the Manhattan style of dead bug PCB construction that some of you might have encountered in the RF homebrew world, or perhaps some of the old Linear Tech App Notes (AN47 - High Speed Amplifier Techniques is a worthy read!).

Some could argue that this better fits the definition of a volumetric circuit, aka, the circuit sculpture work that we normally see from Praus, or maybe Mohit Bhoite, but with the use of the brass front plate to serve as a chassis ground, I'd say that it's going for function over form.

However you classify it, it's a striking build that hides its inner filigree behind a finely fabricated front face.

It's soldering Jim, but not as we know it.

Let's look behind that faceplate and get a feel for just how Praus has gone about constructing this masterpiece.

First and foremost, some advice that holds true in any project: measure twice, cut once. Looking below, we can see the start of the planning out where to place all the components, in a bid to simplify wiring later on.

Something as simple as rotating the ESP32 board can have a huge impact on the lengths and placement of wiring, due in part to the ESP's lack of true pin mux capability — certain peripheral functions are fixed to certain pins!

With all the parts laid out, Praus can move on to soldering. But it's not soldering as we know it! Indeed, this "BrassBoy" is physically soldered together, with the mounting pegs for the parts formed of brass tube, soldered to the front plate of the device.

As you can imagine, this much metal presents a significant thermal mass to get up to temperature. This is beyond the capabilities of most benchtop soldering irons, so Praus has had to improvise a way to preheat the work — in this case, a conventional PCB preheat station has been temporarily repurposed to great effect!

With the mounting post locations identified and marked during the layout stage, the posts are soldered in place, and the boards subsequently soldered to the posts.

Having fixed the parts firmly in place, the next challenge is the wiring — in this case, a manifold of point-to-point brass rod work. Most of us would need a wiring diagram before jumping in here, but that's not going to suffice for this project.

The diagram seen above resembles more of a PCB layout, and in effect, it pretty much is! With color-coded "layers" used to denote the layering of the brass wire work, the BrassBoy is effectively a five-layer (four signal, one ground) freeform circuit. Even the resistors used connect the button assemblies to the I/O pins are mounted in according style!

With the internals of this project looking as fine as they do, it almost seems a shame to have them tucked away behind the still beautiful brass frontage all the time.

With that in mind, Praus has machined a bespoke perspex rear cover, complete with the enlarged handgrip section to accommodate the battery, as found on the original GBC — a nice attention to detail!

So the question that everyone must be asking now, does the functionality match the exquisite form of this build? Well... we'll leave the video from Praus below to answer that question, and any others you might have still outstanding!