Recently cheapo video walkie-talkies popped up on everyone’s favorite online retailers, which naturally lured in the usual gaggle of reverse-engineering enthusiasts of cheap tat to see what’s inside these devices, as well as what more they can be made to do. Cue [Aaron Christophel] doing just that, with the typical DOOM demo as proof of concept.
Inside these cheerful little devices is a TXW818 MCU, made by TaiXin Semiconductor. It provides its own CK803 CPU core at 240 MHz with 272 kB of SRAM, as well as BLE and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi support. For these walkie-talkies an additional 4 MB of PSRAM is provided as well as 2-4 MB of SPI Flash.
The display is a glorious 240×320 LCD, which actually fits rather well with a game like DOOM. As also explained on the GitHub project page, to build the project you simply have to fetch the CDK IDE and build the binary. After that it can be flashed with an STM32F103 ‘Blue Pill’ based board.
According to [Aaron] the SDK is rather convoluted and not that nice to work with, so it’s not a sleeper ESP32 alternative, but these cheap walkie-talkies could be nice to tinker with anyway. Other than playing games, of course, as the side buttons aren’t very conducive to gaming, and the limited Flash space required compressing the WAD game file.
Waiting for the first Gameboy case mod with added functional buttons, d-pad and, of-course, Tetris podt.
It needs over the waves doom deathmatch
My first thought as well. Needs Multiplayer Doom.
No directly related to this article, but I just found a game console ANBERNIC RG280V at local Goodwill. It has “OpenDingux” on board and also comes with preloaded DOOM variation. Kinda interesting device for tinkering.
Here is the link: https://anbernic.com/products/anbernic-rg280v
Some interesting specs: 2 MicroSD slots, DDR2 512M. 320×480 2.8 inch IPS screen and somehow Network ready.
Very well made.
I haven’t played much with it.
put reticullum inside
please!
Now even walkie talkies need RAM.
Of course they need RAM! How else would you get the latency?
Need ram for compressed video. They’re not doing proper mpeg (3 frame buffers), but need a few rows of the video buffer for motion jpeg’ish “stuff”.