The MicroBox is a handheld game console that runs on an Arduino UNO R4

That shiny new Arduino UNO R4 board that you got has quite a bit of power under the hood, thanks to its Renesas RA4M1 Cortex-M4 microcontroller. It has more than enough power to run games and one great way to take advantage of that is by building Szymon Kubica’s MicroBox handheld console.

The MicroBox design should be suitable for both the UNO R4 Minima and UNO R4 WiFi. The other hardware components you’ll need are a DFRobot Input Shield and a small 1.69” color LCD from Waveshare. That DFRobot Input Shield is pretty nifty, because it is very affordable and gives you an easy way to add a joystick and four action buttons to your Arduino.

Other than that, the MicroBox just has a 3D-printed enclosure and a USB battery pack.

Of course, none of that hardware is any good without games to play. That’s why Kubica programmed a few of his own. Those include clones of Minesweeper, Snake, Snake Duel, Conway’s Game of Life, and 2048. All of those are Arduino sketches, selectable through a simple game launcher. 

Kubica has plans to release a Sudoku game, too. And if you’re so inclined, you can also program your own games for the MicroBox. You don’t even need to build a MicroBox to do that, because Kubica provides an emulator you can use to play the games he created or those that you create.

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