Mini Mac Pi

Build Your Own Mac Pi

Relive the glory days of 128k by making your own Mac Classic, with 3D printing and DIY electronics. A Raspberry Pi Model B and 320x240 mini touch screen display make this an easy-to-build project. In this tutorial, we'll guide you through the steps of printing, building and assembling your own Mac Pi.

This project was inspired by John Badger from RetroMacCast!

How it Works

You can either have a service print the parts for you, or you can print them yourself on a FDM 3D Printer. This project requires minor assembly and soldering. The Raspberry Pi can run a flavour of minivmac and emulates booting into Mac OS 7. The Mini vMac is an emulator that runs software for early Macs that ran Motorola's 680x0 microprocessors. This project doesn't require original hardware and runs along side raspbian.

Project Advisory

Like taking things a part? Have a soldering iron laying around? Have an interest in 3D printing? Then this project is for you! This mega-cool build is ideal for anyone with a bit of maker experience looking for a exceptional weekend project.

Challenges and Expectations

The most difficult part of the build may lie with the experience of the builder. If you are new to 3D printing and don't own one, you can still make this project by having a 3d printing service make and ship the parts to you. If you are new to hardware like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, you'll be glad to know there's only a minor bit of soldering and most components just connect together. Keeping this in mind, there are a few things to expect!

The Mac emulator does boot up and can run some basic apps but, there is:

Minor Application Support
No Audio Support
Only Mac 7
No Networking
Screen Size Cut to 320 x 240 so we can use the PiTFT (original was 512x342)

Prerequisite Guides

We recommend walking through the following guides to get you situated with the Raspberry Pi and the Mini PiTFT 320x240 touch screen display.

Parts & Components

Most of the tools parts and supplies are available in our shop.

PiTFT 320x240 2.8" Touchscreen
Raspberry Pi B
6600mAh Lithium Ion Battery (to make it portable!)
Slide Switch (to make it portable!)
Powerboost 500C (to make it portable!)
Stereo Class D (optional add on if you want internal speakers, audio isn't supported in vmac)
Thin Speaker 8ohm 0.25w (optional add on if you want internal speakers, audio isn't supported in vmac)
Panel mount HDMI cable