Nintendo Classic Mini themed Raspberry Pi 3 Mod. B

TWM

Hey guys,

first of all thank you for a great platform to build a retro game collection on. I've just finished working on my RetroPie project -
a NES Classic mini lookalike which isn't much more than a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in a ventilated NES-style case running the latest basic and unmodified RetroPie frontend. Yet that's exactly what I was aiming to do, and I like the look of it and maybe my idea inspires someone to recreate and improve the design (forgive me if I picked the wrong forum to present it ;) ).

Setup:

1 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (+ Original Power Supply + 16GB Micro SD card)
2 small Heat sinks for Raspberry Pi & similar SBCs
2 Revoltec AIR GUARD fans, 40mm / 12V
1 DC-DC Step up converter capable of 5V input and 12V output, in this case DROK LTC187 found on Amazon
1 NES-style Raspberry Pi case, mine is The perseids Mini Retro case (black/red) found on Amazon
Few bolts M3 (25mm lenght), nuts, jumper cables, cable ties and tools (electric drill & file)

First I disassembled the case, placed the fans on the top case and drilled the holes (3mm diameter) to fix them and marked the fans' positions. I used the drill to perforate the case and make the ventilation holes, sparing the fixation holes for the fans, of course. Unfortunately it took some force to remove that section, I had to break it out. You can probably save yourself some trouble if you have access to a bench drill. Then I filed off the edges of the ventilation holes, and added some space for the fan's cables to be bend inside - a 4mm hole for every fan's cables was sufficient in my case. I also drilled four 3mm holes on one side of the top case to put four male-male jumper wires through (smaller holes will probably do as well, since I had the DuPunt connectors still on the cables' ends when I drilled the holes and only removed the connectors later since the pins tended to bend too much).

On the bottom case I drilled two 3mm holes to mound the DC-DC converter (input at the bottom, output at the top), put a nut on a bolt and put one of those through each hole. On the outside of the case I fixed the bolts with another three nuts on each bolt for a little distance between converter and case, added the converter board and fixed it with two more nuts. I removed the cases' bottom door for additional Micro SD cards and put two male-female through it, filed away two small sections that were blocking the cables' way to the converter and connected the female ends to the PDB on the inside and the converter on the outside. Note that I also removed the male DuPunt connectors and also shortened the lacing before installing them in the converter's output ports. Then the Raspberry Pi wanted to get installed inside the bottom case, which required me to remove what I called the PCB a few sentences ago, reinstalled everything and added the heat sinks to CPU and Ethernet chip. Talking about the bottom case, I had to remove quite some plastic around the SD card slot to make space for the Micro SD, otherwise the Pi wouldn't have fit in or there would have been no space to put a card inside, like at all... Back to topic.

The bottom case was pretty much done now, but I still had to install the fans on the top case, fix them with bolts and nuts, and connect them to the DC-DC converter. I could only use three bolts on each fan since my drill holes haven't been done too accurately, but it still works quite well. Now here's the trickiest part: The Revoltec fans I use come with some - talking Raspberry Pi dimensions - very long sleeved cables. For those of you confident enough of soldering, I clearly recommend to remove the sleeves and shorten the cables! Otherwise you have to do it like I did, loop the cables and tie them together as much as possible so you can crimp them into one corner inside the top case where they will block about half of the air outlet. I might fix this later... ;)

Once the fans were connected to the male end of the jumper wires I had put through the top case, the whole thing was ready to be reassembled so RetroPie could finally be set up. "Proof of concept" can be found here (I'm probably going to add more pictures later):

https://picload.org/folder/wawwr.html

Aside from solving the fan cable mess inside the case which also made it fairly hard to close it after all, I'm thinking about overclocking the Pi a bit, although I'm sure that CPU/GPU frequency and voltage is less of a problem than tiny 1GB RAM and missing hardware acceleration. N64 roms, as far as I can tell, are running at anything from 5 to 50fps, which makes them quite hard to play. I think this might be fixed when RetroPie supports the "experimental" GPU drivers that are already available and also available to install via the config but render the frontend unable to start. Yet I'm very satisfied with my custom NES Classic when it comes to NES and SNES games.

Best regards
TWM