After programming my MicroGranny Organicer for my MicroGranny Sampler, I was using that for a while to play samples during our live sessions. But after a while I stumbled over this beautiful device, the PiBoy DMG. This is a case for a RaspberryPi that looks and feels like an original gameboy with some extra buttons and an analog stick. It runs RetroPie (Operating System specialized on game emulation) and EmulationStation (software for emulation). I bended Emulation Station to run custom python scripts and wrote a sampler-application that can play a sound on one of the six button presses and navigate between different pages of samples and presets through the d-pad. This resulted in the device I always wanted. It’s battery powered, rechargable, has a display to see the sample names, direct sample playback through assignable buttons and, most important, an easy way to update the samples. To update I simply type \\retropie in my Windows Explorer, and I can add new folders (presets) and wav/mp3-files (samples) which are directly available on the device through WLAN.
It sounded like such a simple thing to get, but it took a quite expensive case and a lot of coding to actually get it. Still I use it until today and I’m very happy with it. The only flaw I noticed, is that the USB-C socket on the PiBoy seems to be mounted quite cheap. I had to replace the hardware 3 times, but that was no problem with the supplier. Now I added a drop of hot glue to the socket and had no issues since.
