Neon Airship’s Speedy Pi Combines an RC Car and Raspberry Pi for Fast Gaming
Speedy Pi was designed around a cheap RC vehicle, with a Raspberry Pi 4, TFT display, and rechargeable battery pack hot-glued to the frame.
Some engineers and makers state the “perfect DIY project” doesn’t exist, could never be conceived, and they’d be wrong. One look at Neon Airship’s Speedy Pi and those notions fall to the wayside. Neon Airship touts the Speedy Pi as “the World’s Fastest Gaming PC for Roughly $132,” as the build straps a Raspberry Pi-based retro gaming platform to an RC car for gaming on the go, although a self-driving Tesla likely beats it in performance, and can probably run Doom.
The Speedy Pi is a project anyone can do for little money; however, it does require a certain level of gluing skills to be accomplished. Under the hood (literally), the Speedy Pi is equipped with a Raspberry Pi 4 running RetroPie, which allows users to run their favorite emulators for arcade, console, and PC games. Neon Airship also includes a 3.5-inch TFT LCD touchscreen display with a handy enclosure that brings those games to life in full color!
As every gaming console requires some sort of power, Neon designed the RC rig with a portable charger to drive the retro console for hours of gaming. On the RC car end, Neon chose the MISSLFJY Remote Control Car and modified it by cutting away a few stand-offs underneath the chassis, which provides a flat surface to hot glue the power bank and RPi 4 to the vehicle. A short USB Type-C cable so as not to get caught in the wheels is used to power the rig on the go.
Besides a few minor hiccups with installing the RetroPie software, the project is pretty straight forward and simple, with very few steps involved in the build process. A detailed walkthrough of Neon Airship’s Speedy Pi can be seen in the video above, complete with links to the necessary hardware and software.