LED Backlight Brings Vibrant Colors To Classic Palm PDAs

May 17, 2022 by Robin Kearey 10 Comments

Back in the days before the widespread adoption of smartphones, Palm was the market leader in PDAs. If you had one of those you’ll probably remember taking notes by writing those funky “Graffiti” characters and tapping your stylus onto, usually, a green monochrome screen. Some models even came with a battery-hungry backlight, but for the ultimate display experience you had to buy the Palm IIIc that came with a backlit full-colour display.

While revolutionary for its time, it was hampered by the technology available: the CCFL backlight took a second to start up, and even with the screen at full brightness it was rather dim by today’s standards. [TobleMiner] fixed these issues by designing a module to retrofit an LED backlight into your Palm IIIc.

The new backlight consists of a long, thin PCB designed to fit exactly where the CCFL tube sits. The PCB holds twenty-one white LEDs along with their current-limiting resistors to provide even illumination from top to bottom. A little MOSFET soldered onto the mainboard ensures the new backlight also correctly responds to the device’s “brightness” setting. [TobleMiner] recommends to remove the bulky CCFL transformer from the Palm’s mainboard to disable the corresponding circuitry and save a bit of weight.

The end result is understandably hard to capture on camera, but apparently gives the screen more vibrant colours. In any case, this might be a useful hack for anyone with a Palm IIIc with a broken backlight, though we can’t remember if that was a common issue. If you’re among those who still use original Palm devices, you might like this Palm-compatible Bluetooth keyboard. Don’t have a classic PDA? You can also run PalmOS on modern custom hardware.

A small plastic case with an OLED screen showing a side-scrolling game

Game & Light Brings Video Games To Your Keychain

May 6, 2022 by Robin Kearey No comments

If you’re old enough to remember the 1990s, you might recall the sheer variety of portable gaming platforms that were around in those days. There was of course the ubiquitous hand-held Game Boy, and if you preferred something larger you could buy a Sega Game Gear or an Atari Lynx. But you could also go smaller with tiny LCD games like Nintendo’s Game and Watch series, with some versions literally the size of a wristwatch.

With all of these having gone the way of the dodo, we’re happy to see that [grossofabian] kept the tiny game world alive by designing the Game & Light: a tiny hand-held games platform with an OLED screen. It’s small enough to attach to your keychain and comes with an LED to act as a mini flashlight. But of course the main feature is the included video game: currently it comes with LEDboy Adventures, a side-scrolling platformer similar to Google’s T-Rex Game. A USB port can be used to recharge the device as well as to upload new games.

The Game & Light is housed in a 3D printed case and powered by a lithium-ion capacitor that can store enough charge for around 40 minutes of play time. The CPU is an ATtiny402 eight-pin microcontroller with 4 kB of flash, which is just enough to store the entire LEDboy game. Although currently only one game is available, the system is fully programmable and open sourced, so anyone who feels up to the task can help develop new games for the platform.

If you like keychain-sized games, you’re in luck: we recently featured the solar-powered but otherwise similar RunTinyRun. A bit longer ago, creative hackers even managed to squeeze entire Game Boys into tiny packages.

Continue reading “Game & Light Brings Video Games To Your Keychain” →

A disassembled Game Boy-shaped Hackintosh

This Big 3D-Printed Game Boy Actually Runs MacOS

April 3, 2022 by Robin Kearey 3 Comments

While mobile gaming has largely moved to smartphones these days, the classic Game Boy remains a hugely popular platform for retro enthusiasts, owing in no small part to its enormous library of quality games. The original Game Boy hardware is pretty much bulletproof, but feels a bit outdated today because it lacks modern conveniences like a large, backlit display or a rechargeable battery.

[iketsj] wanted to build a modern take on the Game Boy design and designed what’s in effect a 3D-printed, oversized copy of the classic handheld powered by a modern single-board computer. Most people would have gone for something obvious like a Raspberry Pi running Linux, but not [Ike]: he decided to go for a LattePanda Alpha board and run macOS Monterey on it. That makes this a Hackintosh, and probably one of the last ones as well since Apple is busy migrating all of its products onto its own proprietary CPUs.

The LattePanda also has an Arduino integrated on its board, which is used to read out the Game Boy’s buttons as well as the resistive touch screen. It communicates with the macOS system through a Python script that emulates mouse movements and keypresses. Sadly, the touch function is not working because [Ike] accidentally damaged the touch-sensitive system while trying to slim down the display module. Still, the seven pushbuttons are more than enough when running a Game Boy emulator, and there’s also a USB connector available to connect external peripherals like a keyboard, mouse or monitor.

We’ve seen several great Game Boy projects over the years: some made from brass, some very wide, and some that stuff modern computing platforms inside an original Game Boy case. Combining a Game Boy with a Hackintosh is definitely a new development, though it matches well with [Ike]’s history of unusual Hackintosh designs. Continue reading “This Big 3D-Printed Game Boy Actually Runs MacOS” →

The hairclip-embedded tool being used on a Tiger 99x game console, clipped onto a spot where the plastic ribbon meets the LCD panel itself, heating it up

World’s Smallest Hair Straightener For Fixing Old LCD Ribbons

March 19, 2022 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

[Stephen] writes to us about an LCD repair tool he has created. We’ve all seen old devices with monochrome LCDs connected by thin film, where connections between the PCB and the LCD have deteriorated and the LCD would no longer show parts of the picture. This is a connection heating gadget, that [Stephen] affectionately dubs as World’s Smallest Hair Straightener, made specifically to bring cool old tech back to life.

A resin-printed mold houses a coil of Kanthal wire, easy to source and simple to make. He reuses a hair clip as a housing for the heating element, which also provides pressure needed to squish the film-printed conductive traces into the LCD as the adhesive melts. High-temperature epoxy brings the two together, and with a variable power supply, this tool successfully brought an old Tiger 99x handheld back to life.

This hack was made possible, in part, because of [JohnDevin Duncan] in Hackaday comment section sharing his experience on repairing LCD ribbons back in 2015, giving valuable insights on the problem that we initially thought would be solve-able with a soldering iron. The knowledge shared was distilled by [Stephen] into a tool that we all can now use when we encounter a device we really, really want to revive.

Last time we covered this topic, quite a few hackers popped up with their stories and suggestions. Old game console fix stories are a staple here on Hackaday, a few pop to mind – this high-effort trace repair of a water-damaged GameBoy cartridge, a badly designed NES cartridge socket reinvention, and this GameBoy LCD sunburn damage restoration guide.

Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher

March 6, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 10 Comments

If you’ve gone to a local city park lately, you might have noticed strange metal baskets on poles with chains dangling free. These baskets are spread out throughout the park seemingly at random. For the uninitiated, Frisbee golf (sometimes known as disc golf) is a confusing concept. You might not think it, but Frisbee golf can be a very big deal to some people. [Stuff Made Here] is back with a disc launcher that he hopes will put all the disc golfers to shame.

It’s no secret that we here at Hackaday are big fans of [Stuff Made Here], or [Shane] (he has his own tag after all), and for obvious reasons — the CAD design process, the careful machining and testing, and the extremely high bar that [Shane] sets for his projects. This one is no different, and it is a tale of iteration and scaling. He started out with a simple goal: break the speed record for a thrown Frisbee.

An initial design was decided upon based on high-pressure air pushing a piston to throw the Frisbee off of an arm. Initially, the arm was way too slow as the airflow was severely restricted due to air solenoids and pressure regulators. After fixing all those problems by fabricating his own solenoid and adding a secondary tank with no regulator, the arm started really moving. However, [Shane] wanted it to be able to be arm-mounted, so making sure the torque wouldn’t melt his arm bones was an important priority.

A counterbalance was added to cancel it out, but that ended up causing additional problems down the road, so the throwing arm had to be made as light as possible. The gripper mechanism had to be redesigned again and again as each time the speed was increased, a new problem arose. Turns out that small plastic discs being accelerated at many G’s tend to deform and slip out of their holders, no matter how well engineered. So [Shane] switched to a clever new design to pull the Frisbee along rather than push. It was too dangerous to really be handheld, and the only tests while he was wearing it were at very low amounts of pressure and power.

Testing it in a wide-open field at full power showed promise and while he had plenty of speed, he wasn’t able to beat the distance record. Breaking the distance record is much harder as Frisbees aren’t really designed with the sheer acceleration that [Shane] is subjecting them to, and they want to flip. Additionally, the Frisbees are lacking the spin that would keep them more stable, and what we do as humans is quite difficult to reproduce. Maybe a larger-scale version of this disc launcher could be made that accepts Frisbees?

It’s incredible to watch this contraption come together as each part needs to be designed and machined first by [Shane]. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher” →

Review: DevTerm Linux Handheld Has Retro-Future Vibe

March 2, 2022 by Donald Papp 32 Comments

It’s not every day that an open-source, portable Linux handheld computer gets announced, so I couldn’t resist placing an order for the DevTerm by ClockworkPi back when we first learned about the stylish little terminal, which includes a 1280 x 480 screen (double-wide VGA) and a modular little thermal printer.

Of course, the global semiconductor shortage combined with shipping slowdowns led to delays, but things did ultimately come together for the project. I’ve always been a sucker for small-format machines, especially ones that come as a well-designed kit, and that means I can tell you all about what it was like to put it together and turn it on. There’s a lot to look at, so let’s get started.

Continue reading “Review: DevTerm Linux Handheld Has Retro-Future Vibe” →

Two revisions of Wenting's custom SSD board - earlier revision on the left, later, sleeker and more complete, on the right.

Custom SSD Gives New Life To Handheld Atom PC

February 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

People don’t usually go as far as [Wenting Zhang] has – designing a new IDE SSD board for a portable x86 computer made in 2006. That said, it’s been jaw-dropping to witness the astounding amount of reverse-engineering and design effort being handwaved away.

The Benq S6 is a small MID (Miniaturized Internet Device) with an Atom CPU, an x86 machine in all but looks. Its non-standard SSD’s two gigabytes of storage, however, heavily limit the OS choice – Windows XP would hardly fit on there, and while a small Linux distro could manage better, it’s, and we quote, “not as exciting”. A lot of people would stop there and use an external drive, or a stack of adapters necessitating unsightly modifications to the case – [Wenting] went further and broke the “stack of adapters” stereotype into shards with his design journey.

Tracing quite a few complex multi-layer boards into a unified and working schematic is no mean feat, especially with the SSD PCB being a host to two BGA chips, and given the sheer amount of pins in the IDE interface of the laptop’s original drive. Even the requirement for the SSD to be initialized didn’t stop him – a short fight with the manufacturer’s software ensued, but was no match for [Wenting]’s skills. The end result is a drop-in replacement SSD even thinner than the stock one.

This project is well-documented for all of us to learn from! Source code and PCB files are on GitHub, and [Wenting] has covered the journey in three different places at once – on Hackaday.io, in a YouTube video embedded down below, and also on his Twitter in form of regular posts. Now, having seen this happen, we all have one less excuse to take up a project seemingly so complex.

Hackers play with SSD upgrades and repurposing every now and then, sometimes designing proprietary-to-SATA adapters, and sometimes reusing custom SSD modules we’ve managed to get a stack of. If case mods are acceptable to you aesthetics-wise, we’ve seen an SSD upgrade for a Surface Pro 3 made possible that way.

Continue reading “Custom SSD Gives New Life To Handheld Atom PC” →