Open Door: Game Boys and NES Consoles

Overview

Built four Game Boys from scratch for ASU Open Door 2023, and four Nintendo Entertainment Systems from scratch for Open Door 2024. All eight running on event day. The point of the project wasn’t the builds. It was bringing them to a room full of kids and putting them in their hands.

Why this, and why for kids

Most kids never get to hold the hardware their favorite games actually run on. They see the screen, not the board. They don’t see the chips, or the way a cartridge clicks into a socket that someone sat down and designed.

Open Door is one of the few days where elementary and middle schoolers can walk into ASU’s engineering school and touch real engineering work in progress. I wanted them to leave with the certainty that this stuff is built by humans with hands and patience, not by magic. Hardware that works in front of you is convincing in a way a slide deck never is.

The builds

Eight units, all from scratch. PCB design, sourcing the chips, loading firmware, and fabricating custom enclosures in the lab using a drill press, SLA prints, and a soldering iron. The Game Boy set came together over the months leading into Open Door 2023. The NES set came together for 2024. All eight working on the show floor.

On the floor

Lines formed. Kids sat down and played for an hour at a stretch. Parents recognized the shells from their own childhoods and stayed too. The best questions came from elementary schoolers, things like “how does the cartridge talk to the screen?”, and got real answers, not handwaves. The intent was hands-on, low-pretense engineering, and that’s what happened.

In the press

ASU’s official news ran a feature on the builds and the showcase. It traveled across the engineering school’s channels and onto social.

What comes next

Different platform each year. Same intent: put working hardware in the hands of the kids who’ll be designing the next one.