A Couple Of New DIY Style Raspberry Pi Handhelds From China

Pix Portable aka Gameberry Retropie

The Pix Portable aka Gameberry Retropie (take your pick) is available on Aliexpress and comes in four price tiers depending on what exactly you want. For most people the choice will be the kit, which requires a little home soldering and some assembly. It comprises of a perspex shell and buttons with a custom circuit board, LCD and 4000mAh battery. You supply your own Raspberry Pi 3 and solder the relevant contacts to enable use of the physical controls and whatever else. The unit has a d-pad, analog stick, 4 face buttons, a start and select button and 4 more shoulder buttons on the back side.

front. notice the scale along the top and left side. roughly 13cm by 6.5cm.
back. you can see at least 4 wires that will require soldering if you were to get the kit.
sides. due to the size of the rpi it makes for a rather fat handheld!

The four price tiers are as follows:

A. All components and perspex case. requires soldering yourself.
B. All components and perspex case. this one comes pre-soldered.
C. The cheapest of the options, this is only for a replacement shell made from metal (I prefer the look of perspex i think).
D. Everything comes pre-assembled and a Raspberry Pi 3 is supplied.

I would like to assume that instructions are supplied in the package, but it isn’t mentioned. It’s also unclear as to whether or not they have a custom RetroPie build available for download. I would guess that the stock image wouldn’t work correctly without some serious config for the LCD and controls, so I’d be interested to hear from anyone who happens upon a link for the customised firmware.

This kit is available from Aliexpress and costs about £56 shipped for the DIY kit. There’s a video on YouTube of someone playing a half assembled unit.

Also on the same account is a video of a similar unit in a Game Boy like portrait configuration. There’s also a lone picture of this halfway down the Aliexpress product page, but looking at the sellers other listings it seems that that one comes without a shell or anything, almost like it’s unfinished.

Coolboy / Coolbaby RS-11 aka BeibeiJia RS-11

This one’s a little more unclear. This one also runs using a Raspberry Pi, but it looks as though an auxiliary circuit board is being used to split the USB ports into a row of 4 instead of two stacks of 2 next to one another. It also looks like it has a barrel jack power socket as opposed to the microUSB of the Raspberry Pi. The listing does state that it’s DIY, but translating the big red DIY banner at the bottom of the screen implies that the DIY aspect of this is that it has been put together by hand, and each unit is somewhat unique because it is not mass produced in a factory.

At a price of nearly £170 ($218) you would expect that this also comes with a Raspberry Pi, which again hints at the fact that the unit is pre-assembled and ready to go.

This one’s available at TMall, but you might have trouble ordering it from there. Commonly people use an agent when ordering from places like this. Googling tmall agent or taobao agent will find you someone. The idea is that supply you supply them the link, they give you a quote which covers the price of the item, plus shipping to your country and their fee. They have the item shipped to themselves, they re-package it and send it on to you. superbuy.com is a commonly mentioned agent, but I have never used one so cannot vouch for them.

Link to this handheld is here.

There’s also some chatter about these handhelds in the Other Game Systems section of dingoonity.

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