cass.si — PiSP-thingy

In order to retain my sanity (and mostly keep myself occupied) whilst at college (which still sucks by the way), I've decided to embark on yet another electronics project.

The PiSP, a portmanteau of the Raspberry Pi and the Sony Play Station Portable, is a handheld console with a similar controls scheme to a PSP, D-pad to the left, XYBA to the right, PSP 1000 thumbstick and all, the usual shtick of handhelds of today, except powered by a Pi Zero W.

The idea came to me one day during the summer holidays, and then I just decided I'd also make a "OS" in LÖVE. A few weeks later and PiSPOS was born.

PiSP

Needless to say getting this to work on the Pi was a total pain in the ass, at least my life was made a bit easier by the fact that PiLove exists, which handles all the SDL/OpenGLES pain. I had to mess around with building fbtft kernel modules (thanks notro), compiling imgui, framebuffer mirroring, SDL resolution issues; as well as dealing with the unreliable Adafruit display (don't buy adafruit, it's robbery).

The development of the OS itself went fine though, apart from a major re-architecture a week ago when I realized procedurally programming clients was going to get out of hand, my previous attempt at writing imgui into and object-orientated design went tits up so I just ran with it.

Currently things are a bit more sane, each page contains 6 icons (or slots, the naming convention is all over the place), which each have a client class inside them, for example, to create:

PiSP

I simply,

pages = {
  page:new({
    { games:new(),      "Games",   "images/Luv/categories/32/games.png" },
    { console:new(),    "Console", "images/Luv/apps/48/terminal.png" },
    { editor:new(),     "Editor",  "images/Luv/categories/32/editor.png" },
    { files:new(),      "Files",   "images/Luv/apps/48/filemanager.png" },
    { music:new(),      "Music",   "images/Luv/apps/32/music.png" },
    { metrics:new(),    "Metrics", "images/Luv/apps/32/metrics.png" }
  }
}

--...

for k, page in ipairs(pages) do
    -- Define an actual x position for the camera
    page.ax = screen.W**(k-1)
    -- Shift each page to the right
    page:draw(page.ax, 0)
end

Which creates a new page, complete with icons, and clients. So yeah.

Right now I'm waiting on a bunch of parts to get going, I hope to be finished by December this year.

🪴🇳🇴👩‍💻🌊🐄

PiSP-thingy