3D-Printed (Baby) Drum Pedal

I really enjoy making things with my 3D printer, and normally my projects involve electronics too.
This was a bit different, but it's a good example of something you can design/print over a weekend.

My little nephew loves playing his toy drums, but the set that he used to have, was missing the bass pedal.
It wasn't worth buying a replacement since he'd outgrow this drum kit soon, instead I'd try to make him one...

10 Minute Mod: GameBoy Screen Rot Fix(?)

I recently picked up a few old GameBoys for a new project, they weren't all in great shape though.
Amongst them was a pretty nice Red example, but it had some inky garbage around the edge of the display.

From what I've read, it's a well known problem with the old GameBoy systems, and appears to be irreparable :(

LED Matrix Animation Frame

A few years ago I saw a really interesting project on kickstarter by Jeremy Williams called the Game Frame.

It uses a grid of RGB LEDs to display pixel art. I thought it was an awesome idea, and looked beautiful.
I couldn't afford to buy one at the time, but now it might make a nice project to put together my own version.

There were a couple of these LED frames around back then. The 'PIXEL' by Al Linke even had a kit version.
The PIXEL had 32x32 pixels vs the Game Frame's 16x16. But the Game Frame did have a nice wooden case.

From reading the docs for the PIXEL, I found out that 32x32 LED panels are widely available and cheap too.

In fact, from my initial google-ing I also discovered a nice Raspberry Pi library for driving these displays.
It was looking like building my own LED frame would be pretty straightforward...

SNESPi - 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Mini SNES(s)

Last year I built a mini NES console using a Raspberry Pi, an NFC reader and a 3D-printed case.
An obvious follow-up project would be to make a mini SNES with the Raspberry Pi.

I probably have more childhood fondness for the Super Nintendo than I do the original NES.
Some of my best gaming memories are playing co-op Turtles in Time and Diddy's Kong Quest with my brother.

I grew-up with the Super Famicom-style European SNES and only learned about the markedly different North American model as an adult much later...

This fascinated me, there's such a contrast between the two styles. I wanted to make a mini version of both.

Mini NES Classic Updates

NESPi - my Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi games console

It was inevitable... I have a Raspberry Pi, I have a 3D printer, I'm a huge nerd...

At some point I was going to print a case for it in the shape of the old Nintendo Entertainment System.

In the end, this project turned into more of a love-letter to the NES than just printing a case.
I learnt a lot of new things about Linux, 3D design, wrote my first Python program and had a blast doing it...

Thermoelectric Drinks-Can Cooler

I am a big fan of Ben Heck. Way back in 2011, Ben made a Super Can Cooler on his YouTube channel and I'd always thought it was a neat idea, something I'd like to build myself one day.

At the time I didn't have an easy way to make the aluminium pieces. Recently though, I had a chance to make my own can-cooler inspired by Ben's version.

The idea with this device is that a drinks can fits snugly in the aluminium 'coldsink' and a pair of peltier modules(TECs) pull heat from the aluminium and dissipate it to the room, cooling down the can in the process.

Experiments with toner transfer...

I recently saw an article about using acetone to transfer toner from a laser printed page onto things.

I did a little more reading about this and thought it'd be an interesting experiment to try out myself.

My first 3D design...

I've been having a lot of fun playing with my 3D printer, downloading and printing things posted online.

This is the first object I've created from scratch, and although it's simple, I'm quite proud of the result.

What are these things anyway?

I have a small set of poker chips I use for games with friends. It's OK for 4-5 players but because it has just 200 pieces, and the highest denomination is only 5,000, we sometimes run out of chips.

It's really a very handsome set, and fits nicely in it's wooden box/tray with enough room for exactly 200 chips. There are also a couple of slots in the case intended to hold cards or dealer buttons etc.

However, decks of cards don't fit when the lid's closed for storage. And you only need one dealer button for pretty much all types of poker.

So although there's no room in the box for more chips, there's plenty of room in those slots for some plaques.

...those square-ish things on the right

The next sensible denomination for my set is 25,000 ten of those would round it out nicely (and we could all pretend to be James Bond).

A cute little afternoon project then, I'll design and print some custom poker plaques...

CTC Bizer Duplicator... My new 3D printer

I've always found it interesting, but until recently 3D printing has been just a little too expensive for me to pull the trigger on buying my own machine.

A couple of months ago I saw an auction on eBay for a decently-priced clone of a MakerBot Replicator and had my impulsive "Best Offer" bid accepted instantly...*gulp*

Je ne regrette rien

Before MakerBot went all evil, they put out a really sturdy open-source machine in the Replicator. 

Predictably there are now some really affordable clones of the original Replicator available, and the version I bought was from a company called CTC.

This was the version I got, plain black plywood with an aluminium heated bed

It's Aliiiiiive...

Just stumbled across my old blog from years ago...

Turns out I'm still paying for the domain. It'd be a shame to keep it empty so I'll start to share details of some of my hobbies again.

Building a Cube64... part 1

A few years ago I came across a nice project, it was an adapter for gamecube controllers on the n64.

I thought at the time it would be very cool to build one of these into an n64 controller plug, but it ended up in my "ideas i'll get round-to one day" pile and I never actually made anything of it.

Recently darthcloud added some new features to the code, so I decided I'd finally have a go at building one.

Wii Sensor Bar Projector

Recently I've been playing my Wii more and more, and it's really great to play with a few friends on a big screen projector.

The problem is, any games that use the pointer need the sensor bar set up. With my projector that means having the Wii in the middle of the room and balancing the sensor bar on a chair so all the wires reach, no good at all.

In this post I'll write about how I built a sensor bar "projector" to overcome these problems without having to fix anything permanently to the wall.

My Backlit Dreamcast VMU

Love it or hate it, the DC controller was pretty innovative. Analogue stick in the "right" place, analogue triggers, and of course the VMU.

The VMU slotted into the controller and could display extra game information like health or ammo.

It also served as the memory card, and could download mini-games to play independently of the main console. Cool, right?

So I made a back-light for mine, no real reason other than why not?

It's not even the beginning of the end...

Last year I was working on an N64 portable, but it ended up getting lost a while back.

I've been planning a new one for a long time, and just got a new 64 at the weekend so I started cutting the board down and doing some wiring.

RAM/PIF swapped, RGB modded and cart-slot RCP wired.

I'm quite busy at the moment so won't be doing any more work on it for a quite while. But at least I've got the ball rolling.

My Darling Dreamcast

♪♫ Two thousand zero zero party over oops.... out of time ♫♪
♪♫ So, to-night I'm gonna party like it's 1999 ♫♪

It's been over ten years since the dreamcast came out, and since I'd recently dug-out my old dc, I thought I'd take a few pics of it to show-off some of my earlier mods.

There she is, in all her beautiful blue glory, a launch-day PAL DC with a two-tone translucent blue shell and a few extra goodies inside.

PSOne screen led-mod

The PSOne screen is great, a major drawback though, is it's high power consumption. Out of the box, it draws about 750mA at 7.5V, almost all of that is to power the backlight.

In this post I'll describe how I saved power with a custom led backlight.

How to build a circuit on Veroboard

There are a few ways to build an electronic circuit, one of the easiest is to use Veroboard.

Veroboard or stripboard is a prototyping board for laying out circuits. It has rows of parallel copper strips with holes spaced at 0.1” to accept most through-hole components.

In this post, I'll try to explain how to build a simple circuit on Veroboard.

Low-battery indicator circuit

I designed this little circuit to show a battery’s status.

It lights an led to show the battery is OK, and will change to show another colour when the battery’s low.

The transistors can be any npn-type, and the leds can be any colour (in the diagram, green=ok, red=low)

The operating voltage range is ~3v-12v, and by adjusting the resistor values it will work beyond that.

The voltage the low led comes on at, is set by the potentiometer.

Momentary latching circuit

Here is a little circuit I made that will allow a momentary switch to turn on/off a load.

Q1 can be any NPN transistor, and Q2 is any N-channel MOSFET capable of handling the current being switched. It should be fine with a range of ~5-12V but I've only tested it at 7.4V.

It somewhat mimics the action of a newer console's power button. I made it so I could switch a relatively large amount of power with a small tactile switch, press for on, press again for off.