The Ben Heck Show

Portable MAME: Rasp Pi No HDMI (1) (7x48)

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Ben shows you a better way to retro game without miniaturizing an SNES mini. He’ll show you how to attach an LCD screen directly to your Raspberry Pi using the I/O. No HDMI required. Ben’s got a 480x272 TFT-LCD screen, pretty much the same screen that was in the original PlayStation Portable. He’s going to wire it up into 16-bit color which would be 5 bits of red, 6 bits of green, and 5 bits of blue. Ben insulates the screen with a piece of plastic. He bends the ribbon cable back so that he can attach the breakout board into position. He can then see how to fit on the Raspberry Pi A module. Felix is desoldering some parts and should have that for Ben very soon. The plan is to manually wire from the Raspberry Pi over to the module. The 50 pin TFT breakout that he’s using is from Adafruit. It gives you a bunch of solder points so you can attach things to a TFT screen. There is also a voltage booster on this board. It’s for the LED backlight. The LED backlight on this runs at 21 volts and they’re going to power this off 5. They will need a booster circuit to take the 5 volts this runs at and bump it up to a higher voltage that’s just 21. There’s a chip and a coil that will give them their higher voltage. Ben pulls out the header and inserts the flat flex ribbon cable into it. Once he knows it’s in place he can lay it down and that tells him optimum position to place this board. Ben puts the LCD breakout board in place and puts the depopulated Raspberry Pi board in place. Felix removed the GPIO header, camera port, DSI port, HDMI, USB, and AV jack from the Pi. Ben takes a look at a super useful document he found at https://elinux.org/RPi_BCM2835_GPIOs. It’s a list of all the modes the Raspberry Pi GPIO can go into. The thing to look at here is the alt versions. If you go to https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/dpi/README.md you can find a depiction of how the GPIO can be mapped to an RGB color space o