I’m sure some of you are wondering why I went through the hassle of doing all of this vs. just buying a Canakit that includes all of this stuff etc.
Well, in short, I bought the OG RP years ago, with plans to make an MM, but never got around to it. My dad recently mentioned that he saw an MM somewhere on the internet, and breathed new life into my project, so here we are.
First things first, I had to get Raspian onto a Micro SD Card, get a female USB adapter, and a keyboard/mouse setup for the commands etc, and power to the RP (Standard micro-usb charger, everyone has roughly 8,000 of these laying around their house).
I used a Sandisk 32GB, and followed the guide right on RP’s website.
Not realizing this has a mini-HDMI, had to get a conversion cable.
Red Bear IoT pHAT (Header NOT soldered, because why would I want anything to be simple?).
The last bit of hardware I needed was a display. Did some searching on the Facebook Marketplace. Found a 24" LG 1080P listed for $80, got it for half…and then stripped it all apart.
Base Pi Zero, no WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities:
Keyboard, mouse, monitor, and power working well:
Destroying a perfectly fine monitor:
Next up: getting WiFi onto the RP.
The headers that come with the basic pHAT are a male/female 20 pin. Luckily my dad had some 10 pin male/male headers laying around, as well as self taught skill with the soldering iron, so he meticulously soldered those to the RP/pHAT for me:
The other option for WiFi was stripping/soldering a USB dongle to the RP board itself:
I bought a few dongles from eBay, (pronounced “China”), but then my dad mentioned the Red Bear pHAT, so I went with that instead. I think it looks a lot better too!