There are many “Mini” computers and consoles that have already been 3D modelled. However I didn’t find a Vectrex anywhere. I had already been doing work on a Vectrex Emulator and decided to model my own and make it work.
The heart of the system is the VoCore I have been playing with on and off for a while now. It’s not super powerful and pushing the pixels over SPI is quite slow, but for something like the Vectrex emulator it does it ok. The screen is a cheap 2.2″ SPI LCD off ebay, originally a phone screen but now very commonly used by the Arduino crowd. It has a touch screen but that is not connected in this case. This is my first VoCore board and I didn’t wire up as many GPIO or even the hardware SPI so the few (4) working GPIO I have broken out all go to the LCD to draw the image.
I used Google SKetchup to make the Vectrex case. I exported it and loaded the mesh into Meshlab to clean up and scale.
Finally it was printed on my M3D (Micro 3D) printer in PLA. I took many prints to get a good one, with lifting/curling problems and many other failures as well as adjustments in size. When I finally had the thing done I realised 2 things.
1) I hadn’t included mounting posts for the LCD.
2) I hadn’t included any way to join the front and back of the case.
Oh well, what else is Hotmelt glue for eh?
The Emulator itself is a port of VECX that I modified to write directly to my LCD instead of using SDL or other graphics method. Power comes from a small LiPo inside and a 3.3v LDO to feed the VoCore and LCD. This makes it totally self contained and portable, along with WiFi it makes it a nice little unit.
The STL files for the case can be found here.
Final outcome? Watch a little demo here,
And a better quality video here,