A LiPo Cell Makes A 4AA Pack For A GameBoy

July 31, 2021 by 14 Comments

Electronic toys of yesteryear were fantastic objects of desire, but came with the fatal flaw of requiring batteries. Batteries that cost more than the average youngster’s pocket money and for which the pestered parent were usually unwilling to fork out every couple of days to support an incessant playing habit. It’s something [Sen] has addressed for the Nintendo Game Boy, and rather than cutting the device up and soldering wires, the result is a unit that neatly slots into the existing 4AA battery enclosure.

The Nintendo rechargable Game Boy pack.
Much more convenient than Nintendo’s own effort!

Electrically it’s a simple case of wiring up an Adafruit module and a pouch cell, but that’s not the essence of the job in this case. Instead a huge quantity of work and iteration has gone into CAD design to the perfect-fitting pack. It’s sure to be a boon for today’s Game Boy player, but much more than that it should be of interest to owners of far more devices that take four AA cells. Most of us probably keep a few packs of AAs for just those moments, perhaps meanwhile something like this could be a handy thing to have instead.

More traditional conversions resort to extreme measures, as with this Game Boy Color.

Developing The First ICs In Orbit

July 31, 2021 by 19 Comments

Over six decades of integrated circuit production we’ve become used to their extreme reliability and performance for a very reasonable price. But what about those first integrated circuits from the early 1960s? Commercial integrated circuits appeared in 1961, and recently Texas Instruments published a fascinating retrospective on the development of their first few digital ICs.

TI’s original IC product on the market was the SN502, a transistor flip-flop that debuted at $450 (about $4100 today), which caught the interest of NASA engineers who asked for logic functions with a higher performance level. The response was the development of the 51 series of logic chips, whose innovation included on-chip interconnects replacing the hand interconnects of the SN502. Their RCTL logic gave enough performance and reliability for NASA to use, and in late 1963 the Explorer 18 craft carried a telemetry system using the SN510 and SN514 chips into orbit. 52 and 53 series chips quickly followed, then in 1964 the 54 series TTL chips which along with their plastic-encapsulated 74 series equivalents are still available today.

Considering that in 1961 the bleeding edge of integrated circuit logic technology was a two-transistor chip with hand interconnects, it seems scarcely conceivable that by ten years later in 1971 the art had advanced to the point at which the first commercially available microprocessors would be produced. It’s unlikely that many of us will stumble upon any of the three-figure SN1-series logic chips, but to read about them is a fascinating reminder of this pivotal moment in the history of electronics.

Header: Mister rf, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Build That Catan Board You Designed

July 30, 2021 by 5 Comments

A couple of months ago, we posted about the one day design [Sam March] did of an electronic Settlers of Catan board. Now he’s released a video with the second half. His first video was about the design of the game, specifically the electronic components. In this video, [Sam] takes us through the physical build of the board.

A couple of visits to his local maker space allows him to cut both the wooden parts of the board, as well as the acrylic hexes that go on top of each piece. Even with a CNC machine, there’s still some clean-up that needs to be done. After cleaning up the edges of the wood with a chisel and staining it, it’s time to put the circuit boards in, wire them up and program them. The build includes a dice roller – pushing a button shows the number rolled by lighting up the tiles in the form of the rolled number. The final touch is having some friends over to actually play the game.

Between the design process in the last article and the build process in this one, we get a good look at the way [Sam] designs things from beginning to finished product. Take a look at our previous article on [Sam]’s design as well as some other Catan articles.

Continue reading “Build That Catan Board You Designed” →

Rare Radio Receiver Teardown

July 30, 2021 by 15 Comments

We’ll admit we haven’t heard of the AGS-38, it reminds us of the shortwave receivers of our youth, and it looks like many that were made “white label” by more established (and often Japanese) companies. [Jeff] found a nice example of this Canadian radio and takes it apart for our viewing pleasure. He also found it was very similar to a Layfayette receiver, also made in Japan, confirming our suspicions.

The radio looks very similar to an Eico of the same era — around the 1960s. With seven tubes, radios like this would soon be replaced by transistorized versions.

Continue reading “Rare Radio Receiver Teardown” →

Step ‘n Snack Fanny Pack Motivates With M&Ms

July 30, 2021 by 5 Comments

[Sam March] has made a lot of different kinds of things, many of which have appeared on these very pages. Nowadays he wants to get the viewers more involved in his projects, so he started doing a monthly collaboration with YT viewers. Basically, he gives a prompt, and people comment with their wild and crazy ideas on the topic. Whoever has the winning idea gets the finished build. The maiden prompt was ‘fanny pack’, and you can check out the result in the build video (embedded below).

Someone suggested a Reese’s cup-dispensing fanny pack that gives you one cup for every 10,000 steps you take. We like what [Sam] did with that idea, because it’s way more practical — M&Ms are the original travel candy, and this way, you get to eat chocolate way more often. Depending on your sweet tooth, Reese’s Pieces would be a good compromise.

[Sam] figured out that the average human burns one calorie for every 25 steps, and that the average plain M&M is worth four calories, so he built a fanny pack with a step counter that dispenses one M&M for every 100 steps taken using a tiny auger. It’s calorie-neutrality!

You might be wondering if [Sam] made the fanny pack, too, or used something store-bought. The answer is neither: at some point in the build process, a company graciously offered to make a fanny pack with a special compartment in the bottom for the M&M dispenser. If you want to build one of these for yourself, you can get the CAD file for the milled base, the screw, the hopper, and the lid plus the code and also the gerbers on GitHub. We see a place for the sewing pattern, but as of now, the folder is empty. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break as [Sam] hits the town in a screaming set of neon workout wear to test the dispenser.

Most of the M&M-based projects we see around here are designed to sort by color. Here’s one that searches for the holy grail — peanut M&Ms that didn’t get a peanut. Continue reading “Step ‘n Snack Fanny Pack Motivates With M&Ms” →

Charger Caddy Shows What 3D Printers Were Meant For

July 30, 2021 by 9 Comments

As computers became more popular in the late 80s and into the 90s, they vastly changed their environments. Of course the technological changes were obvious, but plenty of other things changed to accommodate this new technology as well. For example, furniture started to include design elements to accommodate the desktop computer, with pass-through ports in the back of the desks to facilitate cable management. While these are less common features now there are plenty of desks still have them, this 3D printed design modernizes them in a simple yet revolutionary way.

While these ports may have originally hosted thick VGA cables, parallel printer cables (if they would fit), and other now-obsolete wiring, modern technology uses simpler, smaller solutions. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t any less in need of management, though. This print was designed to hold these smaller wires such as laptop chargers, phone chargers, and other USB cables inside the port. A cap on the top of the print keeps everything hidden until it is lifted by hand, where a cable can be selected and pulled up to the top of the desk.

While it might seem like a simple project at first, the elegance of this solution demonstrates excellent use of design principles and a knack for integrating slightly older design decisions with modern technology. If you have a 3D printer and a cable management port on your desk, the print is available on Thingiverse. Not every project needs a complicated solution to solve a problem, like this automatic solar tracker we recently saw which uses no complicated electronics or algorithms to reliably point itself at the sun.

Build A Barebones 68000

July 30, 2021 by 32 Comments

The 68000 chip was ubiquitous in the computing world well past its heyday in the 1980s. It was used as the basis for many PCs and video game consoles, and even in embedded microcontrollers. Now, one of its niche applications is learning about the internal functions of computers. 68000 builds are fairly common when building homebrew computers from scratch, but projects like these can be complicated and quickly get out of hand. This 68000 project, on the other hand, gets the job done with the absolute minimum of parts and really dives into the assembly language programming on these chips. (Google Translate from Spanish)

[osbox68] built this computer by first simulating its operation. Once he was satisfied with that, the next step was to actually build the device. Along with the MC68008 it only uses two other TTL chips, a respectable 32 kilobytes of ram, and additionally supports a serial port and an expansion bus. A few 74-series chips round out the build including a 74HC574 used for debugging support. With a custom PCB to tie everything together, it’s one of the most minimal 68000 builds we’ve seen that still includes everything needed to be completely functional.

After all, including the TTL and 74XX chips the entire circuit board only uses 10 integrated circuits and a few other passive elements for a completely functional retro computer. [osbox68] also includes complete schematics for building a PCB based on these chips to make construction that much easier. Of course, emulating an old microcontroller instead of using TTL components can save a lot of real estate on a PCB especially if you’re using something like an FPGA.