Gameboy Color fidget keyring

tl;dr

So I seen Wermy (sudomods fame) over on Instagram had made some amazing DMG style fidget keyring’s, I bought the files and printed them. These are a really cool idea but I also had an idea to improve upon it by adding LED’s when you press the buttons. I had to put my own spin on this so join me below to see how I pulled it off.

Hardware

Shell

I wanted to design my fidget key-ring to be styled on the GBC, This was mostly because I has a lot of GBC parts laying around and to make it different from wermy’s.

I first started designing the button wells because they were the hard part and once I had the buttons sitting nicely I finished off the shell with the fake speaker grill and a phone charm holes. I was wondering what screws to use to hold the shell together when I came up with the idea to use the tri-wing GBC screws, This also finished the look off. My thinking was if your into Gameboy modding you will have left over screws and buttons and membranes so it makes sense to use the screws.

PCB

Now I had the front and the back and the buttons feeling nice I could design the PCB. I kept it super simple and just went with a CR2032 battery which runs 3v. I wired it up so that the buttons would act as switch so when pushed they would connect the 3v to the LED’s and light them up, with it being 3v I didn’t need an resistor so made the part count even lower. You can press the buttons together to light both buttons at the same time or just individually. The battery’s should last a real long time.

The PCB’s were ordered from OSHPark because I wanted ENIG coating otherwise the connectors tarnish over time and become unresponsive.

Files

https://github.com/facelesstech/gbc_fidget_keyring

Video

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