Crafting a Handheld Game Console with RP2040 – An Open Source PCB Design Journey | Hacker News Reader

Crafting a Handheld Game Console with RP2040 – An Open Source PCB Design Journey

codetiger.github.io

33 pointscodetiger10 comments

I am a professional physicist, but I know very little about analog circuit design. What are some good learning resources for this? Not afraid of textbooks.

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is the best.

Thank you. I took a look at the book. It's really comprehensive in covering all the theory of modeling each component. But it doesn't really get into how to design larger circuits. There are examples of little circuits in each section, but it doesn't explain how to join stuff together into an effective whole. I think that's the hard part. How to mix paint and use your brush vs how to draw a beautiful painting.

I feel like a book focused on design will be written very differently.

I might be off base since I've been an electronics hobbyist (plus one time I got snookered into doing it for a job) for 30 years, but I feel like there's isn't that much electronics-specific theory behind designing larger projects (outside of the general skills needed for any kind of engineering). I feel like hooking together large software systems is much more complex, whereas with electronics once you learn the principles and skills for single-purpose circuits it's not that hard to figure out how to make something that solves multiple problems.

At the end of the day, it's all connected with wires, and every part large and small has to be designed with the hard rules of electricity and electromagnetism in mind. There's an IC for everything these days, so you get a lot of modularity for free.

You do need to have a good mind for how to break down complex problems, and how to determine a project's actual needs, but that's not necessarily something you'd put in an electronics book. A lot of the more complex things about larger projects also tend to be adjacent to EE proper (things like RF, optics, mechanical engineering, networking, etc.)

One thing I do recommend for an on-the-ground view of a large high-tech engineering project are the On The Metal[0] and Oxide and Friends[1] podcasts, some of which go into the nitty-gritty of the electronics/hardware design for their entirely custom server rack, networking gear, and "Cloud Computer" (and some of which address software or general tech topics--each episode has notes/synopsis so you can focus on the electronics and hardware ones if you want).

[0] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal

[1] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends

The thing with analog electronics is that the sum of parts is not equal to the parts. Attach two components together, and it creates feedback effects that change the behavior of the two components.

You might be right though, that the only way to learn the skill of putting things together is by designing a thousand circuits and building intuition.

True, I am biased towards mostly-digital systems that keep anything analog-ish (sensors, amplifiers, converters and power supplies, PHYs, RF, etc) at the periphery, connected via digital buses, where all the scary analog stuff is taken care of by off-the-shelf components or self-contained textbook circuits. But analog electronics is still electronics!

> the only way to learn the skill of putting things together is by designing a thousand circuits and building intuition.

When it comes to electronics projects specifically, I'd say less intuition and more just learning the rules and conventions; the intuition part is more general. In the job where I got roped into doing the electronics for a pretty complex machine, the design process went (surprisingly) smoothly largely based on skills that I learned doing complex software projects, and somehow found myself translating into a very different field. (Maybe that's just me, though, or maybe that project working out was just a fluke.)

Unless you mean "intuition" as in learning the rules until they become second nature, in which case I agree: on that project, all those years of dicking around with breadboards and LEDs paid off.

I have a few design books and you're right, they do focus on how the total sum was brought together: https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/the-design-book-9781838...

> How to mix paint and use your brush vs how to draw a beautiful painting

electronics feels like such a different discipline to 'art' and 'design' in the traditional sense, since "beautiful" in a painting or piece is in the eye of the beholder, while "working" is probably the metric you're aiming for with electronics

that said, we use solderless breadboards ;) you just have to experiment with anything you can't find in a book until it just works... over time you build up experience with what 'doesnt work' though

Noob question here: could you write a game for this handheld using godot ?

No. Godot is way too big to target microcontrollers like the RP2040.

Ok thanks for the heads up

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