Rook Console Hardware!

My Vision

2/19/23

I've been working on the Rook Console on and off for over two years now. It started as a
proof of concept laid out on a breadboard and molded into a bunch of individual PCBs
jerry-rigged into a jank casing. While my current design "works" in a sense, it's a mess
and it has lots of issues. Therefore, I've decided to develop a mainboard for my console.
There are many different pros and cons to this decision. Designing a PCB is a challenging
task and is something that I have no experience doing. Another con is that it will be a
lot more expensive compared to buying cheaper boards that I can easily find on amazon.
However, I am going to design my own mainboard, as the benefits outway the cons. While I
have no experience designing PCBs, I hope to log my journey as a guide to other developers
and hobbyists to help others understand the process. It's certainly a valuable skill and
one that I hope to learn through this process. While my final product will be more
expensive than buying random premade boards and frankensteining them together, I will be
able to make a more compact and reliable console. Soldering a bunch of wires together and
trying to shove it all into a small casing is very difficult and so far I haven't done
the best job of doing it correctly. My goal is to create a design that makes replicating
my build process similar, for both the casing and the hardware.

Let's get to it! >:D

What do it need?

2/19/23

First off, I need to figure out what all my board needs to have on it. Hmm, maybe some
sort of list would be helpful here. insert list here

Oh yeah thats right. Theres one more thing. I need to make a seperate board for the
controls. Well, that one would have:
That's probably all of the main components that I'm going to need. Of course there's going
to be a lot of work and research that will need to be done before finalizing my component
selection though. Annd of course there's probably going to be a power/charge indication
LED somewhere and a reset button for the esp32. I'll go into more detail about the parts
as I decide what I'm going to use.

Have a good day rest of your day :D

PCB Development

2/19/23

Weeee. I think I've learned how to make pcbs now. I followed this tutorial video. Massive
props to the guy who made it, it was very easy to follow and really helped me understand
the design process and the software. I didn't fully go through his tutorial but I do
better understand how to use the software now and will be referring back to it for my
implimentation of the ESP32 into my board. I'm using EasyEDA and will most likely use
JCLPCB to manufacture the board. Here are some screenshots of my crappy unfinished dev
board following his tutorial lol, it taught me how to use the software therefore I
believe I'm ready to give my own board a crack.
schematic pcb wiring pcb
yes i know i didn't fully finish it. nu shoot pls :(

Hehehe, custom board here i come >:D

ESP Module >:(

2/19/23

There are sooooo many different ESP32 SoCs to choose from when working on a project
like this. Do I want a lot of flash? I do want a lot of PSRAM? Maybe I only want a
single core board. Maybe I want a dual core board. Maybe I want a PCB antenna
attached to the SoC. Maybe I want to use an external antenna. There's so many
different variations of the ESP32. There's even different cores depending on the
refresh and make of the board. How on the earth will I ever choose which one to
use? Well, let's start with looking at the different series of ESP32s.
They are as follow:

Yikes, thats a lot of different lines to choose from o.0 Well, lets start with something
simple. I know that I want to have a dual core SoC, so lets knock out any line that only
has a single core. The ESP32-S2 series only has a single 240 MHz core, therefore it isn't
going to be helpful for my purposes. The ESP32-C2 series has a single RISC-V based 120
MHz core, therefore it isn't going to be an option either. The ESP32-C3 line has a
slightly faster 160 MHz RISC-V based core, however it has only a single core. The
ESP32-C6 has only a single core, therefore it also isn't suitable for my needs. The
ESP32-H2 series has a lower power 96 MHz core, which also isn't going to be helpful.
That leaves me with the ESP32 and the ESP32-S3 lines. The ESP32 series is the original
line of the chips. They have both single and dual core configurations, and support 2.4
GHz Wifi and Bluetooth Classic/Bluetooth LE. The ESP32-S3 is a Xtensa LX7 dual core
processor that runs at 240 MHz, and has 2.4 GHz Wifi as well as well as Bluetooth 5.
The newer cores and newer bluetooth revison is a big win in the case of the ESP32-S3
line. Another benifit of the newer line is the higher flash and PSRAM capacities it has
to offer. This will be very important when it comes to programming the game engine for
the console. Since there isn't enough SRAM for a proper framebuffer for the display, I
use sprites to move things around the display, which is very SRAM and PSRAM intensive,
therefore the more available the more I can support on screen at a time. With enough RAM
it might even be possible to make a very simplistic framebuffer. Flash is important as
it is what I will be storing the game engine and any games on. I've considered having
a game interpreter that runs images of games through the microcontroller to allow for
more games to be stored on external storage, however I am undecided as to how I want to
impliment that as of now. So the more flash and RAM available the better. This leaves me
with the ESP32-S3 series to work with, which is a much smaller list of possible modules
to choose from. They are as follow: Well hey! Thats not too bad at all. There's only a few options left to choose from. The
ESP32-S3-WROOM-1/1U is the best documented of the modules. There's several dev
boards based upon this design that I could use as a basis for my board. It
supports up to 16MB of flash and up to 8MB of PSRAM. The ESP32-S3-WROOM-2 is
very similar to the previous module, however it has 3 less GPIO pins, and can
support up to 32MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM. However, I was unable to find a
board with a schematic that used this module, meaning that I would only have
espressif's datasheet to make a board off of. That's not something I really
want to do, therefore I'm going to cross it off from the list of options. It's
also incredibly expensive, costing over $18 USD, where as the previous model's
top spec costs just over $5 USD. The ESP32-S3-MINI-1/1U supports up to 8MB of
flash and 2MB of PSRAM in an external package. It has 3 more GPIO pins than the
first module. However, it's also getting crossed off of the list, leaving me with
only the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1/1U module. The difference between the 1 and the 1U
variant is that the 1 variant has a PCB antenna, while the 1U variant has an
external antenna connector. For my purposes, I'd like to use a PCB antenna, so
I'm going to use the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module for my project. But wait! There's
more! There's different variants of the individual module. Yuck. So many different
things to take into account. However, this choice is quite easy. The last portion
to decide is how much flash and PSRAM I want to have on the module. For my use case,
I want as much as possible, so I'm going to use the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8
module with 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM.

Say ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 three times fast. You can't >:P

Important Links

ESP-S3-WROOM-1 Datasheet
ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8

Existing ESP32 Dev Boards

2/20/23

Alright. I've decided on what ESP32 module I'm going to use. Now I have to design
the rest of the board around it. Just like the video tutorial that I followed to
learn how to use EasyEDA, I'm going to be taking a look at some dev boards that
already exist in order to choose parts and make my schematic. Here's a list of all
the different schematics I found that use the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1(the flash and PSRAM
doesn't matter in this case because the pinout will stay the same.):

Hrmph. That's a lot of schematics and funny random info. I think my next update will
be a schematic update with the main chips chosen for power.

idk who decided to do this but thats a lot of schematics

No im not dead

5/5/23
schematic

Finished PCB (untested)

5/23/23

I've just ordered my board and will update this again when I test it. A huge
thank you to the folks over on reddit who helped me get this figured out.
see this post for the first schematic review and this post for the second
schematic review. This post is the pcb review itself. Below is my final
design, and I will update this once again when I recieve the board.
schematic pcb top pcb bottom assembly top assembly bottom

Finished PCB (tested!)

1/22/24

It's been a while since I last updated this devlog. I'm going to call this
"finished" for now. The board does work! Every part of the board works to
my knowledge. However there are some caviats. I managed to flip my rx and
tx on my usb port, however with a custom usb cable this isn't a problem for
my current development. I'm going to split off into a few different devlogs
for different parts of the project code. I'm going to end this off with
pictures of what the current board looks like. My first PCB has been made,
and works.
board top board back

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