Power can be a problem. I don’t mean the kind where you have too much power, and you get corrupted six ways from Sunday. No, I mean the kind where you need electricity to flow to the pieces and parts in exactly the ways that they expect. And since we’re using consumer parts to build the project, these things aren’t easily modified. But, you know what? This is a problem that can be solved.

We just haven’t been able to solve it yet. The PC takes the majority of the power, which we expected, and the screen takes a comparatively minimal amount. I bought this specific screen model because I saw it powered by USB in this video. Unfortunately, it won’t pull enough power either from a power brick (same brand as the video, but different model) or from a USB cable plugged into a wall wart rated for more than enough juice. I’ve reached out to the maker of the video, but haven’t gotten a reply.

It’s worth noting that the difficulties we’ve run into have had me considering whether or not I should continue the project. And then, at one point, we had the screen on and connected to my laptop, mirroring the display. And, still, that little 10″ screen is beautiful. It’s so pretty. And with that, I was determined all over again to see this thing through to its conclusion.

If you have any ideas or expertise that you’d like to lend to the situation, please contact me with the details you’d need to help with the problem, and I’ll send them your way.

There’s this thing called a mock-up. My good friend had to explain this to me, because I was entirely unfamiliar with this stage of the prototyping process. A mock-up is where you arrange the parts, or bits that represent the parts, close to how they’ll be on the final product.

Why? Well, this way you can make an effort to predict how the details will come together. You can see where there will be room for air flow, test different orientations of the motherboard, and where the ports will be exposed, things like that. In fact, we did that very thing, and made an unexpected decision in the process.

We decided to make it wider.

With the weight of the batteries, we were a little bit worried about holding the device up by the joy-con rails. We didn’t want the mounting screws pulling out, or damaging the joy-cons themselves. Also, they’re small, especially in relation to the rest of the device. If we slightly angle the battery packs underneath them, we provide a better grip and more leverage to hold the device. (If you look at the photo, the mock-up is looking at the back, with the screen down.) We tried to make the angle similar to the angles used in the charging grip. Why waste Nintendo’s R&D?

This made the device a bit wider, but the angle of my arms now feels far more comfortable. I did think about another drawback, though. During charging, the battery packs may warm up to create sweaty palms on the grips. We’ll have to test that once we actually form the grips, and use real battery packs, rather than dead ones.

Full disclosure – due to travel on both of our parts, as well as home repairs, the project has stalled a bit. BY NO MEANS has it stopped. I’m still excited about this and still want to make this a reality.

With everything else tested and taken care of, it was time to look at housing. What about the battery, you ask? My good friend (remember him?) is working on the battery pack, I reply, and I’m not intending on getting in his way. So, housing it is.

Getting the screen apart was pretty easy. Five or six screws, one behind a Quality Control / Void Your Warranty sticker, and it just slid apart. There was plenty of room in there, and everything was placed in a logical way with standard screws and such. Easy to move around, easy to play with.

Getting the PC apart was a little less easy. I had to take out the wireless card and antennas, the hard drive, the fan and air tunnel unit, and the CPU heat sink. And that was just to get to the screws attaching the board to the case.Once the screws were removed, the motherboard was… reluctant to come out of the case. Once I figured out the proper angles, I was able to extract the board without damaging it. It was touch and go there for a minute, so there were many sighs of relief once it was out.

Then came the moment of truth! I lay the motherboard on top of the screen back to see if it would fit, and… well, you can see the photo above. The board is too big (or the backing is too small) by a matter of millimeters. It wasn’t terribly disappointing, because now we get to make a custom housing for the unit, and make sure both the screws for the screen will fit, but that the screws for the motherboard will ALSO fit. We’ll also get to account for internal wiring, cooling vents, and which ports we want to be accessible.

Originally, the plan was for vacuum-molded plastic or acrylic. My friend sent me a video for a fiberglass tape that he thinks will do a better job. If we make the housing out of tape, I’m never letting anyone forget it. Or, for that matter, living it down.

You may notice a few changes to the PC in the photo, there. The project has been humming right along, and a lot has changed. The most obvious change, I think, is the hard drive.

The S-ATA SSD that I had did the job, but it was under the system required space, and took up quite a bit of room. Skippy, you might ask, how can a laptop hard drive take up a lot of room? Okay, that’s fair, I respond, space is definitely relative in this case. As I mentioned in the last post, this motherboard has M.2 slots, one of which I used for the wifi card. I spent a little money and ordered a M.2 hard drive, and it’s ridiculously tiny, despite having 250 gigs on it. It’s the Crucial branded number on the left, there. It’s incredibly fast, was immediately compatible, and generates very little heat. With all of these benefits, it was the way to go when space will be at a premium.

The wifi card looks a little different, too. That’s because I ordered antennas for it! The first antenna I tried to attach was a bust. Apparently, when the standard changed from Mini PCI-E to M.2, they took the opportunity to make the antenna connectors smaller. Incredibly small. I was expecting a struggle after my last attempt to attach antennas, but these clipped right on. AND! They have adhesives on the end for when I run them around the edges of the screen. Bonus!

Also! My Dualshock 4 controller seems to have mysteriously morphed into Nintendo Switch Joy-cons, attached to a Charging Grip. With the wires attached to the wireless card, bluetooth works under SteamOS, and can see the Joy-cons. Unfortunately, it sees each of them as a separate controller, rather than seeing both as one. If you look closely in the back, you may see the Magic-NS adapter sticking out the back. (Thanks to My Mate Vince for this!) When using that, the Joy-cons show up as a single controller that can be easily mapped through Steam’s interface. I played some Bastion and some Talos Principle with them, and was NOT disappointed.

The next step is to take apart the screen and get the motherboard out of its case, determine if we need a custom housing, and move forward from there. SPOOOOOOON!

To see all the posts for this project, click on the “Handheld Gaming” category below.

So, we have SteamOS working on a Super Small Form Factor box. We have a couple of games downloaded and tested. What’s next?

Well, I’ll be mounting controllers to the side of the unit, so making sure that SteamOS handles non-Steam Controllers well is an important step. Before I drop $70 on the Switch Joy-cons that will be in the final product, I hooked up my trusty DualShock 4 controller with a MicroUSB cable. SteamOS automatically recognized it, and accepted it as an input device. I tweaked the controller layout in the OS a little bit, because I’m a picky person, and the config changes worked AND saved between games.

The next step was adding wireless and bluetooth connectivity. The motherboard has two M.2 slots on it, one designed for a hard drive, and the other designed for just what I was looking to add. Once the card came in, it was incredibly easy to install and use. SteamOS recognized it right away. This was the exact opposite experience I’d had when trying to replace the internal wifi/bluetooth card on my laptop, so I was overjoyed. OVER. JOYED. Unfortunately, I couldn’t successfully test it for connecting to the local network or to the DualShock 4, because I was (and am) waiting for the laptop antenna I’m going to mount on the inside of the screen. Hey, when your friend is hooking you up with free parts from his collection, you can wait. But, it works! In the OS! And can see things!

Figuring out which screen to use was difficult. I needed something that wasn’t going to suck a lot of power, was able to handle full 1080p, and wasn’t too large to use comfortably on an airplane between my substantial belly and the seatback in front of me. That’s the whole point of this project, right? Thanks to this sweet video, I ended up going with this screen, originally meant for videographers and photographers. It’s incredibly light, and has a lot of room under the back panel. It’s full 1080p, and is incredibly crisp. It honestly looks better than the test monitor I had it hooked up to, which has just added to my excitement. Its only drawback is that it can’t be powered by a conventional USB port.

The project is coming along so smoothly that I’m terrified of jinxing it. BUT! Next post will be about swapping out the hard drive, and adding the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers!

The project continues! The first step was to get a Super-Small Form Factor (SSFF) PC that had the hardware to run Steam games on top of Debian Linux, which is what SteamOS is a fork of. Luckily, I have a good friend who tends to collect cast-off hardware.

The first model I tried was a Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p Tiny Desktop. It has an Intel Core i5-3470T processor at 2.90GHz. The processor has an on-board graphics card, which was good enough to handle what the project requires. We cobbled together 8 gigs of RAM from a couple of different boxes. It has onboard 802.11n and bluetooth, but only VGA and DisplayPort outs, when the screens I was looking at were all HDMI. Also, during install, my friend and I could only get video to output to the VGA port, which was not going to work. So, on to the next one.

The second model I tried was a Dell OptiPlex 7040 micro. It’s got an Intel Core i5-6500T processor at just under 3GHz, which also has an integrated graphics card. This one already had 8 gigs of RAM installed, but no wifi or bluetooth. It didn’t have a hard drive, so I pulled a 128 GB SSD out of my LaCie Rugged enclosure and crossed my fingers that the hard drive space requirement was able to be fudged.

It was! I hooked it up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. SteamOS installed, with no error, and booted right up! There was some serious screen twitching going on with the video card (Skylake! *shakes fist*), but a configuration change fixed that completely. I installed some games, and was grinning ear to ear at how smoothly they were playing.

Next Friday – Testing with the controller! Ordering and testing the screen! Also a wireless and bluetooth card!