WatchDuino

[Myndale]

Arduino in a watch form factor:

http://www.coconauts.net/projects/watchduino/

The schematic looks very familiar...

https://bytebucket.org/rephus/watchduin ... ema_bb.png

[DFX2KX]

That's... Almost identical, isn't it? Save for no SD card and USB controller?

Makes me wonder if you could shrink a gamebuino with the sd card and usb down to that size.

[Drakker]

There is definitely room to shrink the Gamebuino... but the price would go up significantly. =)

[adekto]

u can make gamebuino smaller but ur going to sacrifice battery life and its going to be harder to control without a dpad

[DFX2KX]

There is definitely room to shrink the Gamebuino... but the price would go up significantly. =)

Indeed. Multi-layer PCB, and all. I wonder if Gamebuino just uses a sensible schematic layout to begin with?

[rodot]

You could easily shrink gamebuino using SMT buttons and replacing the ATmega328 with an ATmega32u4 (because it doesn't require an FT232RL for the USB port). You would also have to remove the expansion connectors and speaker (or move it somewhere else, and/or replace it with a piezo disk).

But reducing the screen's size would be the first step I guess. You could use a 0.96" OLED display... but because of their higher resolution you won't be able to feet a display buffer in the microcontroller's RAM

[Drakker]

I'd say the screen is pretty much the only thing we wouldn't want to shrink...

Maybe this could be an interesting project for the future, a really slim Gamebuino. Same shape and screen as the current one, just, say, 1cm thick or less. If the Arduboy can do it... it should be possible with the Gamebuino itself. The "thick" version would be for developers and hardware tinkerers and the slim one without extension ports could be a portable gaming machine for those that only want to play Gamebuino games on the go.

[rodot]

Actually this is already a "slim" Gamebuino, the first prototype was entirely through hole with 2 single sided PCB and 4 AA batteries

[Drakker]

Got any pictures? =)

[rodot]

Here you go:

front.jpg (82.35 KiB) Viewed 7959 times

back.jpg (79.28 KiB) Viewed 7959 times

etching.jpg (110.81 KiB) Viewed 7959 times

PCB.jpg (64.08 KiB) Viewed 7959 times

assembled_PCB.jpg (74.63 KiB) Viewed 7959 times