Picade goes mobile

Hi,

I wanted my Picade to be independant from external power source.
It’s so much easier if you can play where you want.

To keep it simple I bought two things:

Anker PowerCore 20100

I choosed this because it’s an Anker, has enough capacity, and 4 LED displaying the charge status.

USB cable with switch

I connected the USB cable with switch to RPi2 and power bank and the previous USB cable to the power bank as my charging cable.


I used some hook-and-loop tape to fix the power bank inside.


I placed the switch in the middle.


Check power bank status from outside.

That’s it!

2 Likes

That is quite cool, is that a small keyboard attached to the inside of the door? Nice idea may copy that. :)

That’s a nice idea. Roughly how long does the power bank keep Picade running for?

Well, it really depends on what you are doing with it!
But it was running more than 24hours in a MAME game demo mode with display on.
Btw, you cannot load and play your picade at the same time with this power bank.
And in addition to the keyboard, I also put two iBuffalo SNES gamepads inside the case. ;)
Only have to find a way to fix them in there now and also to keep it easy to put them out and in again…

FYI - I’ve just built my Picade with a Rasp Pi 3 and it’s running retropie and playing games fine on an Anker PowerCore 20100 powerbank :-) It only works if I also use an Anker usb cable as well though.

Just ordered my Picade and running it from an Anker is a great idea (I already have one lying about).

What do you mean by “Use the Anker USB cable”

I stumbled upon this post last night and wanted to say thank you for making it. The dangling power cable from my Picade has been annoying me recently and this has provided me with a decent solution. Bit annoyed that I didn’t think of it myself to be honest as I already had all of the parts needed.

Did you have any problems with under voltage warnings? When I have the screen powered by the pi I get the warning icon, this was solved by using the Anker’s second port to power the screen. I’m also getting the warning if the sound is turned up too high. It’s not a huge problem though as I don’t normally have the volume that loud.

Any way thanks again as I now have a Picade I can use more than a few feet away from a plug socket.

Edit: Spoke too soon the lightning bolt is back.

Edit again: Decided to pull the various components out one at a time to see if I could locate the problem and it would seem to have been caused by a Vilros wifi dongle. Replaced it with the official Pi dongle and the lightning bolt hasn’t been seen in the short time that I’ve been testing it.