Installing a Raspberry Pi inside the PlayStation Classic

hey everybody thanks for tuning in to another episode of retro cution today i'm going to show you how to take the playstation classic and install a raspberry pi 3 inside of it i've already modded this playstation classic that i'm holding right now and as you can see it looks completely stock from the outside but if you look under the hood you can see this this baby's not exactly street legal so i'm going to go ahead and walk you through the entire process to install a raspberry pi 3 into your playstation classic so i'm going to go ahead and open up a brand new playstation classic the way they package this thing is funny man it's like those russian dolls it's like a box inside of a box inside of a box it's like they spent more time designing the box than the actual console i'm let's go ahead and open it up and remove the board [Music] just slide these little memory card covers off and you can go ahead and remove the and throw it in the trash all right so to make everything fit we're going to have to go ahead and cut this part of the board off there's a few ways you could do this you could use a dremel you could maybe use a mini hacksaw but i just got this awesome mini table saw from china and i'm going to use this bad boy so i'm gonna be very careful doing this i don't want this to turn into a live leak video it's a little sketchy because i'm at a weird angle uh because of the camera but i'm just gonna be very very careful and you guys do the same at home [Music] [Music] all right now that we got our board cut we're gonna go ahead and move on to probably the most challenging part of the entire project and that's removing all of these ports from the raspberry pi so you can try to desolder them but i've found through experience the best way to remove them is just to very carefully cut them off while taking your time to make sure you don't damage any of the nearby components so i get it started by just clipping the two ends here and then lifting the shielding up and once you get under the shielding all the pins are right there for you to cut so i'm going to just go ahead and fast forward through this because it's a pretty long process and uh you really don't want to rush when you do this because you could destroy your pie and once you get to the end here you can just rock the shield back and forth and it'll eventually just break off you can see i got the first one off and it doesn't look so bad just gotta be very careful all right so i've got the second usb port removed and as you can see it looks pretty good it looks bad while you're doing it but the results are good you just again you gotta just be very careful so to remove this ethernet port i'm just gonna work my cutters under the seams on the sides and eventually you'll be able to just pull the shielding right off of it and once you get the shielding off you just want to go ahead and start cutting this plastic jack apart it's going to take a while to get to the pins we just got to keep working at it [Music] and once you see the heads of the pins you can go ahead and use a small screwdriver to pry it up and then you'll have access to get your cutters under there and cut all the pins [Music] and as you can see it looks really good very minimal scratching now our pi 3 looks like it went on a diet so that made a really huge mess just gonna clean this up real quick all right so that was pretty much the hard part of this project so now we're ready to go ahead and do some work on the shell we're gonna go ahead and cut this post and this support piece here but when you're cutting these be very careful go slow and don't cut too close to the bottom of the case because if you do you can very easily put a stress mark in the plastic and you'll it'll be a white mark that you'll be able to see so be very careful take your time [Music] and we don't need it to be flush we just need it to be lower than this lip right here so again just remove this and be very careful so after we're finished with those we need to go ahead and remove this little bit of plastic from this screw post between the front controller ports you see this slot right here it was like it was made for a pie look how nice the pie fits in there and you see it has a little bit of pressure when it's pushed down that's really good because when everything's mounted in here it helps keep it in place so let's go ahead and get our new hdmi port installed i got this adapter on amazon and i'll go ahead and include a link in the description for it it's the perfect size for this project it's got a little bit of a lip on it so we're just going to trim it off real quick and you'll notice when you try to fit it it doesn't quite fit that's because of these two plastic tabs in the way so we're just gonna go ahead and cut them out now our port lines up perfectly so to mount it in place we're going to use some glue so i went ahead and put some scratch marks around the port for the glue to hold on to if you can find this brand of super glue this is the best stuff out there so go ahead and apply some glue around the edge of the port but be very careful not to get any inside so after we got a holding in place we're gonna go ahead and just apply a little bit more glue around the edges for extra strength and if you're wondering how strong this is check this out i'm pulling on it pretty hard we'll go ahead and plug hdmi cable into it solid so now we're ready to go ahead and fit our pie inside of our shell so just go ahead and slide it into that slot you got to use a little bit of finesse but it'll fit once you get that in place go ahead and plug the hdmi cable into the pi and you can see once everything is in there the hdmi cable fits perfectly against that post and it does a really good job of holding everything in place so our playstation classic board will just sit right on top of our pie and you can see when they're together there's plenty of space in there they're not touching each other at all now if you plug the power into the playstation classic board you'll probably hear some sizzling and notice the chips are burning hot so we need to go ahead and kill this board by cutting all these traces right here to ensure that there's no power getting to any of these chips and for good measure i'm just going to go ahead and cut through these traces here too [Music] want to make sure this board is dead now i'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of solder to the ground plane here and that'll be our new ground connection this area of the board here is where we'll tap in to get our 5 volts from the usb power connector i ran out of black wire for the ground so blue's just gonna have to do so when i make power wires i like to just use my drill to twist them up together makes it look a little cleaner and more professional so after we made our connections you can see we're just passing the five volts through the usb connector to these two wires so we're gonna go ahead and solder them onto the pins on our pi and if you connect 5 volts to one of the 5 volt pins on the gpio that'll give power to the pi sorry for my hand being in the way so now that we've made our power connection let's go ahead and test it yep you can see that red indicator led on the pi it's getting power and now both of our boards are sharing a common ground which will make the rest of our wiring a lot easier [Music] so you see the bottom two pins on each momentary switch are connected to ground so since both of our boards are at the same ground they're already grounded to our raspberry pi so we'll just need to attach one wire to each of the momentary switches it's always a good idea to check continuity as you work to make sure you're not shorted anywhere this will help save you a lot of trouble shooting time later so now we're ready to wire up the usb connectors just to have a little bit more space i like to remove these two electrolytic capacitors right here you can just twist them right off so before we try to solder onto these pins just going to add a little bit of flux and tin them up do now to wire these i'm just going to use a small piece of ide cable this is the best wire to use for these usb ports and as always check continuity now i'm going to go ahead and install the new led you can try to wire onto the existing led but i choose to just burn it off and put a new one in this is the only hot glue on the entire project and since our boards are grounded together i'm gonna go ahead and just solder the ground wire from the led right to this ground plane right here now all our wiring on the playstation classic board is done and we're ready to start connecting all of it to the pi so we're going to go ahead and connect our led first this goes on to pin 8. and i will be including a diagram so don't worry if you're having a hard time following along so let's go ahead and connect our on and off button to pin 5. and as always check continuity make sure you're not shorted out anywhere our reset button and the open and close button on the playstation classic shell have to go to two pins each so i made these little jumpers to make it easier to connect them here's a better look at how i made the jumpers so i'll go ahead and connect this one on and again all the pins are going to be in the wiring diagram so don't worry if you're having a hard time following along so now i'll just go ahead and bend it out of the way and before we attach the wires to the jumpers we're just going to slide a little piece of heat shrink onto each of the wires so after making our connections we'll go ahead and slide the heat shrinks on to cover those joints to make sure they don't get shorted out against anything so we're almost done we just have to connect our usb but before we do that we're going to actually go ahead and mount the playstation classic board into the shell it makes connecting the usb wires a lot easier so make sure none of the wires are getting pinched just move them out of the way and go ahead and screw the playstation classic board down so our usb wires actually connect to the pads and the exact orientation they're already facing so before we connect them we're going to go ahead and tin the pads [Music] [Music] now just be very careful not to touch your soldering iron to the playstation classic shell while you're doing this [Music] [Music] [Music] now this is really important i'm sorry i didn't talk about it earlier in the video but even though these momentary switches don't show any continuity between ground and the top pins the gpios still get grounded when attached to them so the way around this is to just slice all the traces going to the top pads until they're fully isolated so one thing that'll happen is if you don't do this as soon as you turn your pie on and it starts to boot the shutdown script will just go off by itself because the buttons are grounded so just go ahead and slice through all these traces and the way you can test it is just to disconnect your wire and touch it to the pad if it's initiating the shutdown script or any of the other scripts that the other two buttons control then you need to just cut the traces some more all right once you got that figured out you're ready to close this bad boy up and you'll notice the case doesn't want to close all the way no problem we just got to cut out these two plastic tabs here and remove a little bit of the plastic lip as well [Music] once you got that removed this baby will fit nice and flush just like original so let's go ahead and install our little memory card usb covers close this baby up and test it out so let's go ahead and switch it on and if you're familiar with raspberry pi you know there's a bunch of text that's usually on the screen i've configured it to be hidden that's such a nice sound okay our usb is working let's go ahead and test out controller port number two make sure that ports working yep so let's try out our other buttons we'll go ahead and try the open button and yeah that opens the retroarch menu like it's supposed to and if you got through this build you go ahead and have yourself a drink just like this guy the emulation feels really great i don't feel any kind of lag or anything like that the picture quality is really good i have the bilinear filter turned on right now the settings let's go ahead and try the reset button [Music] yeah that worked great took us right back to our games list so let's go ahead and try to power it down and yeah that works just fine so i'm planning on uploading my base image of this that you'll be able to download and just put on an sd card you'll have to add your own games but gpio buttons and everything like that will already be set up for you and i'll also have a wiring diagram available that you can download that'll have a clear picture of where you have to make all your connections and if you have any trouble or you have a question just go ahead and leave it in the comments and i'll do my best to respond to it as soon as i can and lastly guys if you enjoyed this video you know what to do please leave a like please subscribe to my channel i've got a lot of great projects in the works to show you all and you're not going to want to miss them so stay tuned

Channel: RETROCUTION

Views: 1,627,740

Rating: 4.5280046 out of 5

Keywords: Playstation, PlayStation Classic, raspberry pi, retropie, playstation classic hack, ps1 classic, ps1 classic hack, playstation mini, playstation classic review, ps classic, playstation classic gameplay, add games to playstation classic, playstation classic mini, ps1, hack ps classic, playstation classic games, playstation classic retropie

Id: zn27YQMGclk

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Bigeg0]

One of the greatest how to videos I've ever seen. Great job and thank you for being so thorough. If you were to paint them black and sell them as Unofficial Developers PS1 Classics I'd be first in line to buy it.

[u/ElricDarkPrince]

Just buy a ps1 shaped raspberry pi case pretty sure it’s cheaper than 100 dollars.

[u/hyp36rmax]

A+ for DIY effort, but did we have to butcher the factory PSX Classic PCB just to leverage the usb, switch and led? I can see the Raspberry PI USB and ethernet ports being too tall for the chassi, but couldn't we just solder in single usb ports, switch and an LED without going through the whole process of re-purposing the original pcb?

[u/daswickerman]

Why wouldn't you just desolder the ports instead of removing them with nippers. Watching this makes my brain hurt.

[u/endperform]

I started watching this, but as soon as I saw the cutters being used to remove the USB ports, I cringed and turned it off.

[u/RETROCUTION]

Here is the tutorial I promised! If you liked the video please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel! Thanks so much!

[u/BusStation16]

Wait so we destroyed a PS Classic, and did serious damage to the Pi!? You know you can buy lots of cases for them, right? Someone is sure to make a nice PSX one soon.

​

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=raspberry+p+case

[u/JayRam85]

$75 for a case. Tempting, but no.

[u/stolirocks]

Use an odroid xu4 instead.