NESPoise – A Nice Looking NES Clone

December 21, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 9 Comments

[Dave] tipped us about the latest project he just finished: a posable, desktop NES clone arcade machine. This idea came to be when its creator gathered a few bits and pieces he had lying around: an NES Retro Entertainment System (Retrobit RES, found for less than $25) and an arcade stick with its buttons. [Dave] then bought a 7″ car DVD screen (less than $40) and started a first standard arcade-looking design with OpenSCAD. As the first draft was relatively boring, he let it mature for a bit until he got another idea, shown in the picture above.

The final result is made of 3D printed PLA and varnished luaun plywood which gives the console a VCS style retro look. Many hours were required to 3D print the different parts using a Makerbot Replicator 2. [Dave] disassembled his Retrobit RES to layout its parts inside the case and also replaced the original voltage regulator with a 7805 on a big heatsink. This may be one of the best ‘nintendo’ hacks we have received over the years, but there have been others that also take cartridges.

Aluminum Unibody Nintendo 64

October 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

NES1

[Travis] wanted us to take a look at his N64 portable to see if it could be featured on Hackaday. By the looks of it, we’re going to say hell yeah. Everything on this portable N64, down to the buttons, is milled from aluminum. It’s an amazing build that raises the bar of what a portabalized game system can be.

Inside this anodized enclosure is the circuit board from an original N64. To cut down on the size, [Travis] milled a new heat sink for the CPU and GPU. All the games – quite possibly all the games ever released for the N64 – are stored on an SD card and accessed through an EverDrive 64. Two 5000 mAh Lipo batteries provide three hours of play time on a beautiful high-res screen.

What’s even more amazing is that [Travis] machined all the parts on an exceedingly small, manual mini-mill. Truly a portabalized console for the ages.

You can check out a gallery of pics [Travis] sent in and his demo video below.

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DIY Metal Detector

September 28, 2013 by James Hobson 15 Comments

Looking for a light project to teach young hackers some very basic electronics? Here’s a quick and easy weekend project, a simple metal detector!

We all know 555 timers are very useful and pop up in a wide range of projects, but did you know a metal detector is one of them? [vonPongrac] stumbled upon this handy guide, a free eBook on 50 555 Circuits, which contains many cool project ideas, including a simple metal detector circuit. It’s a very basic concept that uses a coil of copper wire as a home-made choke — when metal or a magnet comes near the coil, it varies the output frequency, and the 555 timer in turn, varies the output sound, alerting you of the presence of something metal nearby.

After the break there’s a video of it during its testing phases. If you don’t have a 555 on hand (tisk tisk) but still want to have some treasure hunting fun you can also build one based on an Arduino.

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Classic PDA Finds Second Life As A Network Touch Screen Display

September 19, 2013 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

pocketviewer

[Tomas Janco] had an old Casio Pocket Viewer PDA collecting dust. Rather than throw it away, He decided to re-purpose it as a display for time, weather, and the current status of his garage door.

The Casio Pocket Viewer was a competitor to the Palm Pilot. The two systems even shared the same LCD resolution – 160×160 monochrome. [Tomas’] particular model is an S660, sporting 6 megabytes of ram and an NEC V30MZ (Intel 8086 compatible) processor. Similar to Palm, Casio made an SDK freely available.

The SDK is still available from Casio, and [Tomas] was able to get it running on his PC. Development wasn’t without pitfalls though. The Pocket Viewer SDK was last updated in April of 2001. Software is written in C, but the then new C99 standard is not supported. The SDK does include a simulator and debugger, but it too is not as polished as todays systems – every simulator startup begins with setting the clock and calibrating the touch screen. Keep reading after the jump to learn about the rest of the hurdles he overcame to pull this one off.

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Prototyping A Low-resolution Handheld Gaming Rig

January 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

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[Jason] has been hard at work on this Arduino-based low-res gaming platform. He even had a fab house deliver circuit boards to pull everything together. It’s a little small in his hands, and the graphics are limited to the 8×8 pixels provided by the display. But it still looks like a lot of fun and the code was written to make adding new games quite painless.

The board hosts an ATmega328 which drives the bi-color LED display using a pair of TPIC6B595 shift registers. Control is provided by a collection of buttons to either side of the display. The unit is powered by three AAA batteries held in a pack soldered to the back side of the PCB.

The image above shows [Jason] giving a Space Invaders game a try. The clip after the break shows respectable action, sound from a piezo buzzer, and it even scrolls your score at the end of the game. But you’re not limited to just one title. Adding new games is as easy as implementing a class in a new header file. You can get a feel for how this is set up by viewing the source code repo.

This reminds us of the Pixel Bros low-res system.

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Tamagotchi Hacking, In Depth

December 31, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

In this strangely fascinating talk, you can follow along as [Natalie Silvanovich] reverse engineers some Tamagotchi. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in digital pets, you’ll probably pick up a trick or two by listening to how she went about taking over the toy. She can now push her own images to the screen, and evolve her Tamagotchi at will.

Listening to her story you might be able to pick up a few tricks as she takes almost every angle possible. She uncovers the black blobs, she attempts to socially engineer her way into datasheets, decaps chips, she dumps and breaks down code. It is also worth noting that, in the beginning, internet electronics enthusiasts were adamant that it just had a PIC processor inside and they were wrong. Having an internet full of experts is a wonderful thing, except when it isn’t.

Then again, having that internet full of experts might be her savior in the end, she’s missing a piece of software and asking if anyone has it available.

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A Pair Of N64 Portables

December 13, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

portables

Casemodding has moved far beyond the old portabalized Ataris and NESes of only a few years ago. Now, the new hotness is more modern consoles including the GameCube, Dreamcast, and the venerable N64. Two N64 case mods rolled into our tip line over the past few days, and we can’t think of a better display of case fabrication and console modification than these two.

First up is [Travis]’s N64 handheld. The case was constructed out of a sheet of ABS plastic with Bondo used to make everything sleek and smooth. There’s a 7″ display in this handheld as well as two LiIon batteries able to provide up to three hours of play time. The fit and finish on this build is spectacular, a testament to [Travis]’ patience and Bondo skills.

Next up is a very very tiny build claiming to be the smallest N64 portable. It’s the work of [bud] and is barely larger than an N64 cartridge. Inside is a 3.5 inch screen and enough LiPos to provide about 2 hours of gaming time. Unlike other (larger) builds, [bud] put the cartridge slot on the outside of the case allowing the cartridge to stick out at a 90 degree angle.

Both very awesome builds that really show off what can be done with a lot of sanding and body filler. You can check out the videos for each casemod after the break.

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