Anavi Play pHAT

The Anavi Play pHAT is a super simple low-cost add-on board for the Raspberry Pi with buttons for retro gaming and slots for up to 3 I2C sensor modules. Put your Raspberry Pi to work: with the Anavi Play pHAT, you can turn your Pi into a retro gaming controller, weather station (with sensors – not included), an IoT hub and more!

Inspired by the classic game controllers of the early 80s, the Play pHAT fits perfectly on top of any Raspberry Pi with a 40-pin header. It runs on the Raspberry Pi OS out of the box, and with the provided Python script you can use it for playing retro games on RetroPie and EmulationStation. Free and open-source software examples are provided for reading data from sensors (not included) for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and light.

Project ideas

The Anavi Play pHAT is an excellent low-cost addition for any Raspberry Pi owner interested in retro gaming and home automation and is an entirely open-source design. Documentation and examples are available on GitHub.

Raspberry Pi Retro Gaming

Thanks to the free and open-source project RetroPie, you can enjoy playing your favourite games from the good old days with more than 30 different emulators using EmulationStation as a front-end. With the Play pHAT and Raspberry Pi Zero, you can have hundreds of retro games in your pocket on a minimal budget.

Unlike bulky USB gamepads, this pHAT fits on top of your Pi Zero and takes up very little space. During vacations or business trips you can easily take it with you in your carry-on baggage and plug them into the TV in your hotel room.

Weather Station (sensors required)

With slots for up to 3 sensors (not included), you can also build a weather station for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and light. If you need buttons for your home automation project, the Play pHAT adds eight of them to your Raspberry Pi too!

Officially supports the following I2C modules:

• HTU21D sensor for temperature and humidity
• BMP180 sensor for temperature and barometric pressure
• BH1750 sensor for light
• APDS-9960 sensor for RGB colour and gesture detection

You can also attach any other I2C sensors, but you will have to take care of its software integration.

Features

• Gamepad with eight buttons for playing retro games
• Slots for up to three plug-and-play I2C sensors
• EEPROM with device tree binary overlay
• Works out of the box with Raspberry Pi OS, fully compatible with RetroPie
• Excellent software support, documentation, and open-source examples
• Compatible with any 40-pin Raspberry Pi (Pi4/3B+/3/2/B+/Zero)

Package Contents

• 1x Anavi Play pHAT

Raspberry Pi not included

Resources

• User manual
• Examples

Open Source Design

The Anavi Play pHAT is an open-source hardware project powered and created with free and open-source software.

It has been certified by the Open Source Hardware Association under UID BG000007. The board is designed with the free and open-source electronics design automation suite KiCAD. The schematics and the PCB design are available on GitHub under CC BY-SA 4.0 license.