GBAA: Game Boy Advance Arduino

While I wait for my screens and stuff to arrive I'm going to stick my three microcontrollers onto a breadboard and start trying to get them communicating and playing nicely.

I was tempted to try and shoehorn them straight into the case, but I want to see where the screen fits in. If it sits deep in the case I won't be able to fit my boards behind it (which is a bit of a bummer), but I have a backup plan.

I'm thinking of putting the pro micro behind the screen (with the micro usb port sticking out of the link cable hole), and fit the other two in the battery compartment. Rather than using AA/AAA batteries I'm going to use a LiPo, but I'm sure that can fit somewhere else :-)

I've been in the parts bin today and found:

Arduino Pro Micro

Arduino Nano

Wemos D1 mini

Wemos D1 mini Micro SD card shield

Wemos D1 mini battery shield

Should be enough to get me tinkering with the code on these while I wait for the screens to arrive :-)

It's 1am, and to celebrate I've ordered some bits and bobs from Aliexpress for this project, just to try out some options:

• 20x4 i2c lcd screen
• 16x2 i2c lcd screen
• 2.8" Nextion touch screen
• Micro SD card modules

As previously mentioned I'm going to try two versions of this; one with an lcd screen and one with the Nextion touch screen.

The Nextion will allow me to design smell great gui screens and menus, which can be called/requested from the Pro Micro via Serial.

If can get the Nextion one working I think that would be a more useful option as it takes the handling of menus away from the pro micro as such. The lcd screen could always be added to the expansion port if that type of display is required :-)

For this project to work it needs to have a nice, easy to use interface.

In order to keep it simple I will write a straight forward set of menus and sub menus for each device:

Main Device (Pro Micro orientated options):

Serial Commands, BT Commands, Keyboard mode, Game Controller

WiFi (for ESP8266 based cmmands)

Search Wifi, Connect Wifi, Access Point, Webserver

Expansion (for Nano):

Toggle Pins (for list of pins to turn HIGH/LOW), run program, configure pins

I order to make menu management easy for this device I would like to make their creation as dynamic and modular as possible; maybe even include an SD card module for me to store some text files containing menumber contents and the commands to be sent when selected. This way I can easily update the sd card via PC (or Web interface on the esp8266) and have the Arduino build the menus from there.

Any input on how to go about this would be swell ;-)