Editing GameCube Memory With A Raspberry Pi

December 5, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

[James] has been working with GameCubes, emulators, and Animal Crossing for a while now, and while emulators are sufficient, he’d like to play on real hardware. This means he needs to write to a GameCube memory card. While there are a few options to do this, they either require a Wii or hardware that hasn’t been made in a decade. The obvious solution to this problem is to reverse engineer the GameCube memory card to read and write the memory with a Raspberry Pi.

There’s an incredible amount of unofficial documentation for every console, and [James] stumbled upon a GC-Forever forum post that describes the electrical signals inside the GameCube memory card. There’s your standard compliment of power and ground pads, along with a DI, DO, CS, Clk, and an INT pin. [James] broke out the magnet wire and soldered up a pin header to these cards. Data was then captured with a Salae logic analyzer, and lo and behold, it looked like a standard SPI protocol.

With the low-level protocol worked out, [James] checked out the Yet Another GameCube Documentation to get the main functions allowed through the SPI bus. The ‘read block’, for instance, starts off with 0x52 and an address offset. A little bit of Python on a Raspberry Pi meant [James] could read and write the entire GameCube memory card. Right now the code is a little rough, but all the work is available should you want to edit your Animal Crossing save with a Raspberry Pi.

This work follows [James]’ earlier work on getting into the debug menu of Animal Crossing, allowing him to add items to his inventory. With this latest advancement, it’s only a matter of time before we plug Raspberry Pis directly into a GameCube.

Yet Another Restomod Of The Greatest Computer Ever

December 4, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

The best computer ever made is nearly thirty years old. The Macintosh SE/30 was the highest-spec original all-in-one Macs, and it had the power of a workstation. It had expansion slots, and you could hang a color monitor off the back. It ran Unix. As such, it’s become the prize of any vintage computer collector, and [Kris] recently completed a restomod on our beige king. It’s a restored Macintosh SE/30, because yes, we need to see more of these.

The restoration began with the case, which over the last thirty years had turned into an orange bromiated mess. This was fixed with RestOBrite, or Retr0Brite, or whatever we’re calling it now. This was just Oxyclean and an off-the-shelf bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide, left out in the sun for a little bit.

Of course the capacitors had spilled their magic blue smoke over the last three decades, so a few replacements were in order. This is well-trodden territory, but [Kris] also had to replace the SCSI controller chip. Three of the pads for this chip had lifted, but this too is something that can be fixed.

With the restoration work complete, [Kris] turned his attention to doing something with this computer. The spinny hard drive was replaced with a SCSI2SD, currently the best solution to putting SCSI disks into old computers. There are a few more additions, including a Micron Xceed color video adapter, a video card that allows the SE/30 to drive two monitors (internal included) in color.

The current plans are to attach a modem to this SE/30, have it ring into a Raspberry Pi, and surf the web over a very slow connection. There is another option, though: You can get a WiFi adapter for the SE/30, and there’s a System 7 extension to make it work. Yes, we’re living in the future, in the past. It’s awesome.

The Circuit Sculpture Contest

December 4, 2018 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Many artists are inseparably associated with their medium: Vincent Van Gogh had oil paint, Auguste Rodin had bronze, and Banksy has the spraycan and stencil. You have ICs, passives, wire, and solder. So often electronics are hidden away, but not today! We want to see you build electronic circuits that are beautiful in and of themselves.

This is Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture Contest and we bet you already have everything you need to enter. Leave behind the drab flatland of 2D PCBs and break out into the third dimension! Or break away from the PCB entirely. Our inspiration comes from a few recently featured projects by Mohit Bhoite and by Eirik Brandal that show functional electronic circuits supported by their own wiring:

Work by @MohitBhoite featured on Hackaday

Work of Eirik Brandal featured on Hackaday

There’s something beautiful in these works. They take what would be unnoticed traces and bring them to the forefront of the project. The core of the challenge is simple: built a sculpture where an electronic circuit is the main building material (or medium if you prefer the artistic vernacular).

Continue reading “The Circuit Sculpture Contest” →

Henry The Hoover Gets A Weapons Upgrade

December 1, 2018 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

In this day and age of unprecedented military expenditure, we’re used to seeing weapons upgrades across all manner of war fighting hardware – tanks, helicopters, attack aircraft, you name it. We’re somewhat less accustomed to seeing the same on a domestic appliance. Regardless, we now have Henry the Hoover packing some serious heat.

Originally a mere vacuum cleaner, Henry was given movement through two motors and gearboxes sourced from a children’s ride on vehicle. A tank was created out of copper pipe to store the flammable gas (which appears to be butane, as used in cigarette lighters), and discharge is controlled with a solenoid valve. Ignition is then handled by a pair of electric ignitors fired by relay. It’s all controlled over a standard hobby radio controller, so you can stand at a safe distance while flambeeing your rug.

It’s a dangerous project, but one that is particularly fun when Henry’s dazed and amused countenance is taken into account. But then again, you might like your flamethrowers wrist mounted, instead. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Henry The Hoover Gets A Weapons Upgrade” →

Homebrew Battery Discharger

November 28, 2018 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Rechargable batteries are great – they save money and hassle when using portable devices. It’s pretty common to want to recharge a battery, but less common to intentionally discharge one. Regardless, [Pawel Spychalski] is working on a device to do just that – in a controlled fashion, of course.

[Pawel] himself notes that the device isn’t something the average person would necessarily need, but it does have its applications. There are times when working with various battery chemistries that it is desired to have them held at a certain state of charge. Also, such devices can be used to measure the capacity of batteries by timing how long they take to discharge when placed under a given load.

The build is one that takes advantage of the available parts of the modern hacker’s junkbox. An Arduino is used with an N-channel MOSFET to switch a resistive load. That load consists of load resistors designed for automotive use, to allow cars originally designed for filament bulbs to use LED indicator lights without the flash frequency speeding up. The resistors are 10 ohms and rated at 50 W, so they’re just about right for ganging up to discharge small LiPo batteries in a short period of time.

[Pawel] has tested the basic concept, and has things working. Next on the agenda is to find a way to get rid of the excess heat, as the current design has the resistors reaching temperatures of 158 °F (70 °C) in just a few minutes. Use some of that power to drive a fan?

Perhaps you’re working with lead acid batteries, though – in which chase, you might want to consider blasting away the sulphates?

Neural Network Pies That Might Be Worth A Try

November 22, 2018 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Neural networks are a key technology in the field of machine learning. A common technique is training them with sample data, and then asking them to create something new in the same vein. AI researcher [Janelle Shane] decided to task a neural network with a fun task – inventing new kinds of pie.

Using the char-rnn library, the network was initially trained on a sample of 2237 pie recipe titles, sourced from around the internet. Early iterations struggled to even spell “pie”, but as the network improved, so did the results. Where we can’t imagine how one would even make a “Sweesh Pie Ipple Pie”, later results, such as the “Impossible Maple Spinach Apple Pie” seem far more cromulent by comparison.

At this point, [Janelle] decided to mix things up, stirring in a further sample consisting of the names of various cookies and apples. The data were carefully sorted such that the network still prioritized pies, but this additional data gave the model a richer library to draw from. This led to such home-baked classics as Flangerson’s Blusty Tart and Chicken Pineapple Cream Pie.

On the surface, it’s a fun project with whimsical output, but fundamentally it highlights how much can be accomplished these days by standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak. We’ve seen [Janelle]’s output before, too – naming tomatoes, no less.

Battery Swap Keeps Sansa Clip+ Chugging

November 21, 2018 by Tom Nardi 40 Comments

You’d be forgiven for not realizing there’s still a diehard group of people out there carrying around dedicated MP3 players. While they were all the rage a decade or so back, most consumers have since moved over to using their handy dandy pocket supercomputer for playing their music. Plus controlling every other aspect of their personal life and finances, of course. Though that’s another story entirely.

But as [Conno Brooks] explained to us, there’s a sizable group of open source fanatics who prefer to store their jams on devices running the Rockbox firmware. Only problem is, some of the desirable Rockbox-compatible players are from the Golden Age of dedicated players, and aren’t getting any younger. In a recent blog post, he briefly goes over his ultimately successful attempt to put a new-made battery into his Sansa Clip+, a particularly desirable player that was released in 2009.

There are a few problems with the procedure that has kept it from being very widespread, according to [Conno]. For one, the Sansa Clip+ is tiny and not easily disassembled without destroying it. Worse, the diminutive 30mm x 36mm x 3mm OEM battery is effectively unobtainium. But ironically he was able to find an even smaller battery which seemed like it should work, assuming he could get it wired up.

The OEM battery on the Clip+ uses three wires, which [Conno] presumed was part of some thermal protection system. He first tried to take the circuit board off the original dead battery and graft it onto the modern cell, but something must have tripped because the resulting Franken-pack didn’t output any voltage. On his second attempt he simply ignored the third wire, and luckily the Clip+ didn’t seem to complain and started up as expected.

[Conno] says there’s some careful flexing required to get the new pack installed and the Clip+ closed properly, and the device’s runtime is somewhat diminished by the new battery’s lower capacity. But if it means another few years of keeping Big Brother out of your digital media habits, he figures it’s a worthy trade.

We’ve actually seen a few hacks now for the Sansa Clip line of players at this point, thanks to its second lease on life as an open source darling; from a slightly less stock-looking battery replacement, to adding a line-in option. When you get sick of listening to Hanson’s discography, you can even boot up what is perhaps the world’s worst port of DOOM.