For all those child hackers, who have been longing to play retro games on Nintendo Switch, Pip is a dream come true for them. The lovechild of Nintendo Switch and Raspberry Pi, Pip has an intriguing Switch form factor, with detachable controllers and a touchscreen in the middle. But inside the machine is a totally open Raspberry Pi!
The Nintendo Switch look a-like might not be able to run the latest Mario, but it definitely play you usual retro games, including Minecraft and to top it off you can even create your own games on the console. How cool is that!
The Raspberry you might be familiar with isn’t the Pi running in Pip. Raspberry Pie Compute Module 3 is what you will find in Pip. This Pi is pretty much same as the standard Pi 3, but differs in the sense that it allows one to build a device with a form factor and has a better battery life.
It is a Kickstarter project; currently crowdfunding funds for the Nintendo look a-like. Getting into the details of the device we see a 4 inch touchscreen and a 5 megapixel integrated camera. Added to this is the 200 mAh battery and three ports, two for USB and one for HDMI. Nevertheless the most attractive feature is the removable micro controllers attached to its sides.
It is designed specifically for kids who are into coding. Curiosity, a custom browser-based programming tool is already loaded into Pip and it supports a number of coding languages including javascript, python and much more.
The project is very exciting as it encourages kids to start their own games and apps and has template projects to help them do so. Once you get a hang of it you can form your own thriller games and make stories or even greater projects like a database. You can test your code using an emulator and once ready you can save it for use in the future.
Once you’ve mastered these basics you’ll learn how to edit, add and personalize the code to play however you like! Curious Chip explains on Kickstarter:
“Curiosity allows Pip to be programmed using a number of popular programming languages. Scratch-inspired drag-and-drop block programming is also supported with our own Google Blockly based editor, making it really easy to access all of Pip’s built-in functionality from a simple, visual programming language.”
Pip, is an intriguing piece of tech aimed at teaching the kids to code and making use of their curiosity to bring magnanimous results and with open, hackable components kids will definitely fall in love with this one!