with back to school season, i’ve found myself on a bus for several hours a day, which raises the question of what could i do with this time. so far, i’ve spent a bit of it studying math + cs, doing homework, watching a show, or just listening to music and getting lost in thought. one of these lost thoughts led to the idea for this project: a makeshift handheld console that could take advantage of my laptop’s hardware to run the games and simply stream it to the console such that i can use some of my bus time to finally make a dent in my handful of untouched games in my steam library.

i didn’t have a lot of time to actually work on it today, but i started the research process and jotted down the systems outline to the best of my understanding in ms paint(see attached; nothing to scale or meant to represent proper connections).

i found a 7in display compatible with the raspberry pi 5, which should work great for this project, then tried making a really poor looking cad model of it in f360. not having all the proper dimensions or really being at a state which i should be working on a casing yet, i moved on to researching the software pipelines that should be hosted on each device and how to go about it. luckily, i found a set of open source software for this very game streaming purposes called moonlight/sunshine and skimmed through the docs and some reddit posts and instructables about using them over LAN and with a raspberry pi, which is what i intend on doing.