The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System Gets Even More Epic, Thanks to a Tiny Custom LED Matrix
A Microchip ATtiny10-powered games console, with swappable games cartridges despite its tiny size, gets a big little-screen upgrade.
Monomymous maker Michael has designed an updated version of his Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, EMES — a tiny handheld console with interchangeable game cartridges, now featuring a custom LED matrix display.
"I decided to experiment with my own custom-made LED matrix display, since the [Plessey] GPD340 display is basically pure high-grade unobtanium," Michael explains of the project's shift in design, "and 10×7 resolution is very limiting for gaming capabilities. So I designed a 15x10 matrix out of 0201 LEDs. The resulting dimensions of the display area is 15 by 10mm [around 0.59×0.39"] with diagonal of ~0.7"."
The tiny custom LED matrix is designed to replace the vintage Plessey GPD340 micro-LED display used in the console's original incarnation, unveiled by Michael last year. The new display is driven by an Lumissil IS31FL3743A LED driver, while the heart of the machine remains unchanged: a Microchip ATtiny10, an eight-but 8MHz microcontroller chip one wouldn't normally associate with a games console, with just 32 bytes of RAM and 1kB of program flash.
The redesigned baseboard puts four control buttons either side of the tiny display board, and a cartridge slot above it. On the rear is a magnetic buzzer — which shares a pulse-width modulated (PWM) output with the LED matrix, switching down from an inaudible >20kHz frequency to audible pitches when required — and a connection for a power supply board that houses a 90mAh battery and a USB Type-C charging port.
The latest updates on the EMES project are available on Michael's Hackaday.io page; source code and design files can be found on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.