Picade HAT (Device-tree Overlay)

This repository contains the software you need to get started with your Picade HAT.

Before you continue, you should make sure that you're running the latest RetroPie, have your Pi connected to the internet and have a keyboard ready to run through the setup steps.

If you want to use the old Python driver for Picade HAT, see legacy-python-driver.

Preparing RetroPie

Create yourself a new RetroPie SD card with the image found here: https://retropie.org.uk/download/

If you're using a Pi 3, or a Pi with a wireless adaptor, you can also drop a wpa_supplicant.conf into the BOOT folder.

On first boot, at the control config screen hit F4 to exit to the command-line.

WiFi

If you dropped a wpa_supplicant.conf into /boot, it wont be installed by default, yet, but now it's easy to set up your WiFi like so:

sudo cp /boot/wpa_supplicant.conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/
sudo ifdown wlan0
sudo ifup wlan0

One-line Installation (Recommended)

Before setting up your RetroPie config, just hit F4 and then type:

curl -sS https://get.pimoroni.com/picadehat | bash

Setup will continue automatically.

When it's finished, you must reboot.

Finally, bind your input as normal!

Automatic Installation

Clone this GitHub repository somewhere onto your Pi: git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/picade-hat
Enter the new directory: cd picade-hat
Run the installer: sudo ./install.sh
Reboot sudo reboot
Bind your controls and enjoy!

Software Details

This overlay supplies all of the functionality for Picade HAT using built-in drivers on the Raspberry Pi.

It will:

Bind the 14 buttons to linux keycodes from a virtual keyboard input
Optionally: bind the power button to KEY_POWER to trigger a shutdown
Optionally: assert BCM4 upon shutdown, to cut the power from the HAT to the Pi
Optionally: set up i2s audio to work with Picade HAT
Optionally: re-route the Pi's act LED and give you control over the trigger function

Once installed, you can change the line in /boot/config.txt to customise your Picade HAT install:

Bind up/down/left/right to wasd and disable digital audio:

dtoverlay=picade,up=17,down=31,left=30,right=32,noaudio

Only use the default keyboard bindings, no other features:

dtoverlay=picade,noaudio,noactled,nopowerbtn,nopoweroff

Set the act LED to show cpu0 activity:

dtoverlay=picade,led-trigger=cpu0

Note: There's an 80 character line-length limit for dtoverlay.

If you want to change many parameters you should use the dtparam command like so:

dtoverlay=picade
dtparam=up=17
dtparam=down=31
dtparam=left=30
dtparam=right=32
# etc

See picade.txt for full documentation.

Manually Building & Installing

You can run make and sudo make install to install picade.dtbo in your /boot/overlays/ folder.

Once done, edit /boot/config.txt and add dtoverlay=picade to the bottom.

See picade.txt for the various options you can supply to this command.

pimoroni / picade-hat