Explore the board

Welcome to ByteBoi's anatomy guide!

Whether you have already assembled your ByteBoi or not, this is going to be a helpful guide where you’ll learn a bit more about the soldered components, small connections, LED lights, and drivers.

We'll start with bigger components and cover smaller components later in the guide.


Exploring the board

Starting with anything else but the PCB board itself would be wrong. Therefore, we present you the star of the night...

PCB stands for a printed circuit board. 
Basically, this fiberglass board has copper traces on it, some protective paint, and insulating material.

Thanks to the copper leads on the board, all the connected or soldered components can communicate with each other.

Without it, ByteBoi couldn't play its games, and the display wouldn’t react after any input from the buttons.

Just like with other CircuitMess devices like Nibble or Spencer, we want our components not only to work wonders but to look cool as well! Therefore, we designed some pretty fun patterns that you can see on the back of the board.

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ESP-WROOM-32

This microcontroller runs everything, and you could say that this is ByteBoi's brain. ESP-WROOM-32 is a powerful module mainly used for sound encoding and streaming music. It is reasonably priced considering all its abilities.

ESP-WROOM-32 also controls pictures on display and LED lights.

Due to its complexity and sensitivity, this module is already connected to ByteBoi's main board.

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Let's check a few main things!

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1. Reset Button

This one’s pretty self-explanatory - the reset button is used for resetting your ByteBoi. You can find this useful in case something gets frozen (which is hopefully never).


2. SD card holder

SD card holder (SD slot) with an actual SD card inside is located at the bottom side of the board. You can store all your games on this SD card. If all the memory is used, you’ll be able to replace this one with any microSD card and continue playing games.


3. USB-C connector

This connector on the bottom side of the board is used for charging and connecting ByteBoi to the computer. Once you connect it to your PC, you’ll be able to program it in CircuitBlocks - a graphical programming interface that helps newbies get into embedded programming.