An Instant Gratification Game Boy Printer

January 19, 2025 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

When the Game Boy Printer was released back in 1998, being able to produce a hard-copy of your Pokémon diploma or your latest Game Boy Camera snapshot at the touch of a button was was pretty slick indeed. But in our modern paperless society, the GB Printer somehow sticks out as even more archaic than the other add-on’s for Nintendo’s iconic handheld. Even among the folks who are still proudly playing the games that support the Printer, nobody actually wants to print anything out — although that doesn’t mean they don’t want to see the images.

The TinyGB Printer, developed by [Raphaël BOICHOT] and [Brian KHUU], could be considered something of a Game Boy Non-Printer. Powered by the RP2040 Zero development board, this open source hardware device plugs into your Game Boy and is picked up by all the games as a legitimate Printer. But instead of cranking out a little slip of thermal paper once you hit the button, the image is displayed in all its 240×240 glory on a 1.3 inch TFT display mounted to the top of the board.

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Trinteract, a small space mouse, operating in Blender.

Trinteract Mini Space Mouse Does It In 3D

January 17, 2025 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

We’re not sure how we managed to miss this one, but better late than never, right? This is Trinteract, a 3-DOF input device that’s both open-source and Arduino compatible. There’s even a neat 3D-printed clip to add it to the side of your laptop.

Imagine navigating 2D and 3D environments, or flying around in Minecraft with ease. [Görkem]’s custom PCB features a Hall effect sensor which picks up readings from the magnet embedded in the bottom of the joystick. You can use any magnetic object as input. In the video below the break, [Görkem] shows a 3D-printed sphere with a disc magnet trapped inside as an alternative. The super-neat part is that the thing moves around entirely on flexures. You know how much we love flexures around here.

[Görkem] has written up a fantastic guide for those who must have one of their own. As a bonus, the guide details the background and thought process behind the design, which we love to see.

Don’t like magnets? This space mouse uses an accelerometer and a spring.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Holey And Wholly Expensive Keyboard

January 13, 2025 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

An Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (UHK) with DIY rainbow keycaps. — Image by [jwr] via reddit

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (UHK) line is, as the name suggests, a great choice for a lot of people. They’re each a toe-dip into the ergonomic waters with their split-ability and those beginner thumb clusters.

However, [jwr] was not completely satisfied and decided to make a custom set of keycaps. The idea was to create ‘caps without the “annoyingly abrasive texture of PBT”, that are larger than average for larger-than-average fingers. Finally, [jwr] wanted the Function row to tower over the number row a little, so these have a taller profile.

So, what are they made of? The look kind rubbery, don’t they? They are cast of pigmented polyurethane resin. First, [jwr] designed five molds in Fusion360, one for each row. Then it was time to machine master molds via CNC in foam tooling board. These were filled with silicone along with 3D-printed inserts, which produced silicone molds for casting keycaps four at a time in resin.

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Bit-Banging The USB-PD Protocol

January 10, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

For one-off projects, adding a few integrated circuits to a PCB is not too big of a deal. The price of transistors is extremely low thanks to Moore and his laws, so we’re fairly free to throw chips around like peanuts. But for extremely space-constrained projects, huge production runs, or for engineering challenges, every bit of PCB real estate counts. [g3gg0] falls into the latter group, and this project aims to remove the dedicated USB-PD module from a lighting project and instead bit-bang the protocol with the ESP32 already on the board.

The modern USB power delivery (PD) protocol isn’t quite as simple as older USB ports that simply present a 5V source to whatever plugs itself into the port. But with the added complexity we get a lot more capability including different voltages and greater power handling capabilities. The first step with the PD protocol is to communicate with a power source, which requires a 1.2V 600kHz signal. Just generating the signal is challenging enough, but the data encoding for USB requires level changes to encode bits rather than voltage levels directly. With that handled, the program can then move on to encoding packets and sending them out over the bus.

After everything is said and done, [g3gg0] has a piece of software that lets the ESP32 request voltages from a power supply, sniff and log PD communication, and inject commands with vendor defined messages (VDM), all without needing to use something like a CH224K chip which would normally offload the USB-PD tasks. For anyone looking to save PCB space for whatever reason, this could be a valuable starting point. To see some more capabilities of the protocol, check out this USB-PD power supply that can deliver 2 kW.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Circuit Sculpture Keyboard

January 7, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

The left half of GEMK-47, a mechanical keyboard with a round screen. — Image by [New-Concentrate6308] via reddit

Don’t worry, [New-Concentrate6308] is working on the GitHub for this final build of 2024, dubbed the GEMK_47. That stands for Grid Ergo Magnetic Keyboard, but I swear there are 48 keys.

What we’ve got here is a split ergo with an ortholinear layout. There’s a round screen and encoder on the left side, and a 35 mm trackpad on the right. There’s also space for some other round thing on this side, should you want another rotary encoder or whatever fits in place of the spacer.

Internally, there’s a Waveshare RP2040 Tiny and a mixture of Gateron Oil Kings and Gateron Yellow V3 switches. That lovely case is printed in silk silver PLA, but [New-Concentrate6308] wants to try metal-filled PLA for the next version. Although the original idea was to go wireless, ZMK didn’t play nicely with that round display, which of course is non-negotiable.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Copycat Keyboard

December 30, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This is Crater75, an almost completely from-scratch row-staggered wireless split board that [United_Parfait_6383] has been working on for a few months. Everything but the keycaps and switches is DIY.

The Crater75 split keyboard, which features OLEDs on the Function row. — Image by [United_Parfait_6383] via reddit

As cool as a keyboard full of screens might seem, can you imagine what it would be like to type at speed on a sea of slick surfaces? Not very nice, I’m thinking. But having them solely on the Function row seems like the perfect compromise. Here, the Function row keys interact with foreground applications, and change with whatever has focus. For the curious, those are 0.42″ OLEDs from Ali with a resolution of 72×40.

I’m not sure what’s going on internally, but the two sides connect with magnets, and either side’s USB-C can be used to charge the board. Both sides have a 2100 mAh Li-Po battery, and the average current of the OLED displays is low enough that the board can run for months on a single charge.

The switches are Gateron low-profiles and are wearing keycaps recycled from a Keychron, which add to the professional finish. Speaking of, the enclosures were manufactured by JLC3DP using the Nylon Multi-Jet Fusion process, but [United_Parfait_6383] says the left side feels too light, so the next revision will likely be CNC’d aluminium. Be sure to check out this short video of Crater75 in action.

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Stream Deck Plus Reverse Engineered

December 26, 2024 by Al Williams 6 Comments

[Den Delimarsky] had a Stream Deck and wanted to be free of the proprietary software, so he reverse-engineered it. Now, he has a Stream Deck Plus, and with the same desire, he reverse-engineered it as well.

The device has eight buttons, a narrow screen, and four encoder dials. The device looks like a generic HID device to the host machine, and once it has been configured, doesn’t need any special software to function. By configuring the device using the official software in a virtual machine under the watchful eye of Wireshark, it was possible to figure out how that initial setup worked and recreate it using a different software stack.

If you’ve never done this kind of thing before, there is a lot of information about how to find USB data and draw inferences from it. The buttons send messages when pressed, of course. But they also accept a message that tells them what to display on their tiny screen. The device screen itself isn’t very big at 800×100.

[Den] packages everything up in the DeckSurf SDK, an open source project that lets you control Stream Decks. So if you just want to control the Deck, you don’t need to know all these details. But, for us, that’s where the fun is.

Way back in 2015, we covered some guy who had sniffed out a USB signal generator. That was easy since it was a serial port. However, you can go pretty far down the rabbit hole.