"Why did you build this thing with only one seat?". "Uh, cause last time I checked, I only have one butt."

After watching a video on youtube a couple of weeks ago of someone installing RetroPie on to a Raspberry Pi and using a Mario/Duckhunt NES cartridge as the casing I was completely hooked and found myself wasting an evening trapped in a Youtube video loop, clicking from one video to the next (I'm sure we've all been there). I was fascinated by all of the things you could do with this amazing tiny computer. After chatting to my friend Steve who is my techy go to guy, I decided to pick one up from Maplins for the boys to have a play about with. We installed Retropie with lots of retro games on and I even shocked myself by watching some videos so that I could add in some coding to fix some bugs. There is that much literature out there that learning some tricks and programming should be easy for the boys to use.

As awesome as the Raspberry PI is to use, the problem we had was that it is just a motherboard, meaning that all the parts are exposed which isn't great when you have little ones using it, plus it doesn't look great sitting on the bookshelf in our lounge. So I did what I always do in this kind of situation and turned to those amazing bricks. I knocked a multi coloured case together in no time but as I got into bed that night I felt really dissatisfied with the outcome. As Opeie wasn't feeling great yesterday morning we decided to have a LEGO creating start to the day, as he happily sat and built an awesome police car for his LEGO Batman movie Barbara Gordon, I had another go at the PI casing.

Seth had made an awesome sofa for Lobster Lovin Batman and it was sitting on the side because he'd not used it for anything, so I used that as the starting block for my case. He had built it so well that I thought it needed displaying. The great thing about LEGO when it comes to a mini project like this is that there are so many different elements to choose from, you can build to fit perfectly. leaving all of the ports accessible, with an easily removable lid to get to the board itself. 

With the new LEGO Batman movie Minifigure range in the shops at the moment, it was inevitable that we would be using those as they are so much fun. Plus they are the most played with LEGO at the moment with the boys so it was definitely a fitting case for what they are loving right now. Anyway, that's enough waffling from me. Here's the strange looking Batboat that we ended up with...

Definitely a lot more interesting to look at than the bare motherboard and if Seth gets bored of it, we can just build a new one, that's part of the magic of those amazing, addictive bricks.