The Raspberry Pi is a notoriously small SBC and half the fun of looking through hundreds of Pi projects is finding cool places people manage to hide them. Today we’ve got a neat project to share from a maker known as Cubey125 over at Reddit. Cubey125 has put a Raspberry Pi inside the dashboard of their Nissan 370Z and fixed it up with RetroPie for gaming on the go.
RetroPie is the goto application for many gamers in the Raspberry Pi community. It’s a one-stop shop for tons of emulators which makes it easy to get off the ground with retro gaming and customizing your projects to your liking. We have a guide on how to set up RetroPie if you’re interested but there are other applications you can choose from, as well, like Lakka or straight up RetroArch.
For this project, Cubey125 is taking advantage of the Nissan 370Z dashboard which has a built in screen. The screen has a composite jack which they were able to use to connect the Raspberry Pi to for video output. Details are scarce on how this was accomplished but you can find HDMI to composite adapters that would get the job done.
Controlling the Pi and launching RetroPie sometimes requires the use of a mouse and keyboard. To make things easier, Cubey125 put a wireless keyboard and mouse in the glovebox. For video game input, a wired Xbox controller is connected. That said, you could always replace it with a wireless controller of your choice depending on what you have on hand and what model of Pi you’re using.
There are already plans in the works to spruce up the rig with even more features. Cubey125 mentioned the possibility of dual booting the Pi to run Ubuntu on the side. It would also be possible to use an OBD2 setup for real-time stats from the 370Z which seems highly appropriate given the project is already integrated with the car.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project and see it in action, head over to the original thread shared to Reddit and be sure to follow Cubey125 for future updates.
