[dark sponge] decided to make his DS lite, solar powered. Or, at least charged via solar panels. He was able to find solar cells that were 60×60 mm, which means he could fit 4 of them on the outside of the DS. This gives him a total of 6V at 80 mA output. These panels charge the battery between uses. The DS has to be open and laying on its face for all 4 panels to be exposed, but this way of mounting them didn’t alter the pocket-ability of the unit. He says he’s been using it for a while and hasn’t had to plug it in yet, but we have concerns about wiring the panels directly to the battery. As [cyrozap] points out in the comments on the instructable, this is a Lithium Ion battery, shouldn’t there be some charging circuitry involved?
[palmertech] and [Bibin] have both completed backlight projects for the Game Boy Pocket recently. The most difficult part of the transplant is carefully removing the reflective backing on the LCD. After a thorough cleaning, a diffuser and backlight panel were added. [palmertech] used a backlight salvaged from a DS, while [Bibin] built his own using LEDs. You can see his backlight in the video embedded below. There’s a disassembly video too.
South Wales Police raided a store in Cardiff seizing 1,800 Nintendo DS flash carts. The devices can be used for playing pirated games or running homebrew software. In the UK, the carts are illegal under the Trademarks and Copyright Acts. The 21-year-old suspect had imported the devices and was selling them both online and in-store. He had over 1,000 devices in his home. Many of them packed and ready to ship. Official statements by the Entertainment and Leisure Publishers Association claim that the hardware irreparably damages the DS handhelds.
We covered [Steve Chapman]‘s Nintendo DS control for his Canon DSLR in September. He’s since improved the software so that it has a timer for sunset/sunrise amongst other things. He also shot about 30GB worth of timelapse images while in Vancouver and assembled a couple test videos. He’s still working out the processing to take full advantage of the 15megapixel images. We look forward to future results since YouTube is now using a much larger player for high def content.
OpenSound Control protocol is an emerging standard for communication between musical programs. It’s meant to replace MIDI. The DSMI, DS Music Interface, team has just added support for OSC. You can now use your DS as generic OSC music controller over WiFi. OSC has TCP/IP support built in, so there is no need to run a host sever to talk to DSMI like you did when they only supported MIDI. We’ve seen OSC used in other projects like the monome. It’s also the basis for the multitouch communication protocol TUIO.
A month ago, we reported that Nintendo’s new DSi portable didn’t work with any of the current crop of flash cartridges. Things didn’t look good for homebrew. Here we are a month later and looking at the release of the Acekard 2i. It’s the first DSi compatible flash cartridge. The features appear to be identical to previous versions and we expect other manufactures will be updating their product lines in short order. You can find a video of the Acekard 2i after the break.
These carts may exist because of pirates, but we happily use them for homebrew. There are a lot of great programs out there; here’s a list of 24 apps that are dedicated to music creation. You can run Linux on it too. It’s as easy as copying a file to a flash drive. If you have a DS and aren’t using homebrew, you’re wasting it. We’ll be picking up a DSi as soon as they’re in the US (they’re region locked).
Adding LEDs makes everything better. Watch this video as a regular old DS gets turned into one of the most awesome things on the planet. A ton of LEDs were added, some to the body, some to an extra cartridge, some behind buttons. Parts are wired into the speakers, so you get nice effects to your music. We’ll bet the battery life suffers, but who cares. This thing is worth it. This was originally taken from Nico Nico Douga, which overlays the comments on the video.
Currently the software supports bracket shooting as well as bulb mode. [Steve] points out that he is currently testing an audio based trigger system using the mic built into the DS and the software is still a work in progress.
While the weight saving benefits of using a DS instead of a notebook are obvious, there are things you do give up going this route. Traditionally, when you tether a camera to a computer the photos are saved directly to the computer where you can view the image on a much larger monitor. With the DS, it seems all you can do is remotely trigger the camera. Given the size and resolution of the screens maybe that’s all it can do.
