Followed the guide and made the first parts of the game. The title screen is done, and the first part of the game where the player sees the lives left and the timer. I understand the code provided, but I don’t really think i can write it myself.
I realized that the chip I initially used for the battery charging a and regulating the voltage to 5v was made for power banks and it required a signal or button press on one of its pins to continue providing power, so I replaced it with a chip actually made for a embedded device. I used a LP4060AB5F for the battery charging and a MT3608 for the boost converter. I only had time to wire the battery charging.
Today I worked on actually settling on a display. I will write my own linux driver for it. I have settled on the first oled that I found. It is in the right orientation, the ribbon cable is a bit too long, but I will bend it when assembling it. I hope that that won’t cause issues. here’s the display: https://www.displaymodule.com/products/2-69-inch-amoled-display-dmkdo0270svca?pr_prod_strat=e5_desc&pr_rec_id=95ad42fb1&pr_rec_pid=10764631343297&pr_ref_pid=10181177311425&pr_seq=uniform
Devlog 1
Date: Jul 22, 2026, 10:58 AM
At first, I tought the hardest part about this project will be to find a screen apropriate for what I want. Turns out it wasn’t that hard. I found plenty of high ppi oled displays o the ipod cutout size.
I could make this one work, but I don’t know how tight the space will be. I don’t want people that might want to make this prject themselves to cut the plastic window, or even worse, the metal chassis. I really liked this display because it is 800x600 at this small size, making it look better than the original ipod screen, at a higher ppi, it makes it look like Apple’s Retina Displays which I really like.
Also, It is the right orientation, so I will not have to bent the ribbon cable and risk of damaging it.
For the “brain” I was thinking for a while about choosing the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, but I later found out that they make the compute module zero, which is esentially a pi zero 2 w in a compute module. - style package. From what I’ve seen, it is pretty easy to solder onto the PCB.
ClickWheel
I REALLY want to integrate the clickwheel into this project beacuse, what is an iPod without it, right? So I start researching to see if anyone has documented it. I got some spare ipod 6th and 7th gen clickwheels, and I wanted to integrate them, but as far as I know, no one documented them, and after arround one hour of research, I came to the conclusion that the 6th gen clickwheel is the the move. What I’ve seen though is that the 5th and 4th gen clickwheels are pretty documented online. After a but MORE research I found this blog post. It has everything documented about the 5th gen cickwheel and I am going to use that. The clickwhel uses a custom controller chip that makes my life easier. It comunicates trough i2c I think, I’m not sure. I will dig much deeper into this once I finish the other stuff that I have to do in this project.
Other components
For the DAC, I chose the PCM5102A. I’ve used it before and it sounds good. Then I went into kicad and started making the schematics for the thing. Here’s the audio part all done (hopefully - it took a long time).
For the power stuff like the battery charging, I used a IP5306 IC. It is designed for a power bank. But I think it works just fine. From what I’ve seen I need to push it’s button every 10 seconds? I think? That is so it doesn’t go to sleep. That only happens when the power is bellow 45uAmps. I chose this chip regardless of the sutting down thing, which I will take care of, because I like that it has a built in boost converter and battery charging circuit.
For battery percentage reporting, I used a MAX17048 IC. From what I’ve seen it’s a pretty good choice for this.
I also found a footprint and symbol of the Compute Module Zero here. This is a project, but I just extracted the footprint libraries because I could not find a standalone footprint. If this appears as copy pasted is because I initialy started this project in macondo, but now I recovered my screen recording here.
