Pocket-sized fun is the name of this game, with the Joy Bonnet – Adafruit's most fun Bonnet ever. This Bonnet fits perfectly on top of your Raspberry Pi Zero (any kind) and gives you adorable hand-held arcade controls. Once you install Adafruit's script onto your Pi, the controls will act like a keyboard, for easy use with any emulator or media player.
This Bonnet works best with RetroPie/EmulationStation. On a Pi Zero we could emulate NES and MAME games (our favorites!) but other emulators that don't require more than 1GHz speeds will work OK too, e.g. a N64 emulator won't work, it needs way more power!
Best of all, this Bonnet is fully assembled - no soldering at all is required. You may need to solder headers onto your Pi Zero (or use press-fit headers) but once that's done you're ready to rock. In theory you could also use this with a Pi A+ or B+/2/3 but it wouldn't be very hand-held.
Since you'll likely grip the Pi during play, we strongly recommend a comfortable enclosure to go along with it! The Adafruit Pi Zero case works well and is nice and rounded for easy holding. A Mini HDMI cable will also make it easy to plug-and-play into your HDMI screen.
Raspberry Pi, HDMI cables, SD card, enclosure, and display not included. But we do stock all those things in the shop.
This mini-kit makes it easy to mount a PSP/Xbox-like thumb joystick to your project. The thumbstick is an analog joystick - more accurate and sensitive than just 'directional' joysticks - with a 'press in to select' button.
This is the smallest Raspberry Pi available at the moment, now with the GPIO-header presoldered. The board is just half the size of a Raspberry Pi Model A+, but with more capabilities!