The Afternoon projects thread.

[Mario]

Cousin gave me a DS lite after dropping it a few too many times. Both the hinges were broken and the ribbon cable was ripped. Hopped on here and found it'll run if it thinks the backlight is there. So I found the backlight contacts and put a 2.2k resistor on (any higher didn't draw enough current; about 10mA minimum had to be drawn). It worked! Kept the touchscreen connected so I can play Animal Crossing, Polarium, and other touchscreen-oriented DS games. Of course, it also plays GBA games.

[thewizdawg]

This only took about an hour but I did do this in the afternoon.

Removed the famicom board from a Power Joy 84-1 cartridge and used a converter inside a NES Pinball cartridge so I can play this on my NES. There's actually some pretty good shooters on here.

[Harshboy]

Just flashed freeboot to my second jtagable 360 today. I present to you my totally safe 360 modding station (and in action too):

[stuntpenguin007]

@thewizdawg

I did the same mod with the same pirate cart . Have you played pandamar yet?

[Tibia]

@thewizdawg- Dang. So much more effective than my approach. I cleared all the chips off some game, then used a converter pinout to wire the pirate mobo to the NES one. Took forever to do.

[bicostp]

I've been working on a desktop rollout/upgrade for a company up in Boston, replacing ancient Dell Optiplex 200-series machines (240s-280s from 2003, mostly) with brand-new OptiPlex 780s with C2Q 9400s. They have some Symantec Ghost boot thumbdrives that only work with the 240s-280s (mostly because of LAN drivers, for pulling images off the SAN), so they wanted to hold onto one. However, a full tower would take up too much storage space, especially if it's only dedicated to one task. Then the big "junk to get rid of" pile caught my attention... Dell couldn't have changed their hardware that much between 2000 and 2004, could they?

So I kludged together a random assortment of parts to build a small form factor PC to use for Ghost. It's the desktop case from a 1.0 ghz Celeron based GX50, with the motherboard from a tower 260 (everything plugged right in), running off the power supply for another desktop Dell from around the same time, with two random sticks of DDR RAM, an old beige floppy drive from some old network equipment, a CD-ROM drive from an old IBM tower, an old 3Com 10/100 Ethernet card, and a 20 gig hard drive from the Clinton administration. (The hard drive is just scratch space; once I get the system running right it will be cloned to a thumbdrive.) The IDE and power cables are hanging out from where the CD drive belongs, and the floppy drive is not installed internally, since none of that will be used on a regular basis and opening and closing the case to hook up and disconnect hard drives is annoying. I threw in a 2.2 ghz P4 from another junked PC nobody wanted, and installed FreeDOS. Right now it can browse the web with Arachne, edit text files, handle SSH and VNC, run a terminal emulator, mount USB storage devices (no plug and play though), and use all the features Ghost has to offer. The only thing it's missing is a PCI SATA controller because I couldn't find one in the junk pile.

All for a grand total of $0 and about 2 hours of work spread over the last few days. (Need something to do while waiting for the hourglass to finish spinning...)

It would be running Windows 3.1 on top of FreeDOS right now if the two sets of install floppies I found in the server room had a complete, non-corrupt copy between them.

No pictures, but it's pretty boring to look at anyway. It's just one of these with wires hanging out of the 5.25" bay.

[humakabula1]

In the past couple of weeks i did...

Put a speaker in an ipod case;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P658dCwFDgc

Modded software for mass effect (switched playable character);
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxxyMSmo1tY

Older stuff...

LED modded my original xbox controller;
http://i931.photobucket.com/albums/ad15 ... G_0588.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://i931.photobucket.com/albums/ad15 ... G_0591.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(pretty lopsided but it was done at 11.30pm, half an hour before the halo reach midnight launch )

Xbox (original) mod i did in about a total of 4 hours, over a weekend;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeDbflO-kJM

[vskid]

Did this last week. My Civic didn't come with a tachometer, and I wanted one. I bought a gauge cluster from a CR-V on ebay and popped it in. Literally took unscrewing 2 screws, pop out the trim around the cluster, two more screws, remove cluster and unplug 3 cables, reverse. And I went from 226824 down to 88825 miles! The screen in the bottom left is an Ultragauge OBD-II scanner. It can tell you just about everything the computer knows and even read and clear codes (handy when your catalytic converter appears to be going out and throws a code occasionally).

Before


After

[Mario]

I found my Dreamcast, and after finding out discs could be burned for it I realized how awesome it it. So I added a VGA port, SD card slot, reset button, and overclock switch.

Spewing wires everywhere before closing it up (which literally took at least a half-hour on its own):


SD card slot:


Back, with VGA plugged in:




Side, showing the SD card, reset button, and overclock switch:


My custom companion cube VMU icon I made with DreamExplorer:


I used a DPDT switch for the overclock switch, so normal speed is orange:


And overclocked is red. Also, the white LED there between controller ports B and C is the SD activity indicator.

[Biased]

@mario:

I love your afternoon projects. What would be considered a major project for you, aside from something like a portable?

P.S. What's an SD slot for in a Dreamcast?

[Mario]

Heh, thanks, Biased.

I suppose a non-afternoon project is one that takes more than a few afternoons. Also, if I need to figure out most of it myself, it has more significance to me. With this, other people figured out all the connections that need to be made. I just followed their instructions.

With an SD card on a Dreamcast, it's possible to boot most homebrew and some commercial games off it with DreamShell. No need to burn a bunch of CD-R's.

[Snow_Cat]

^ - -> Mrow? It cost half a tank of gas to repalce the instrument cluster?

[vskid]

^ - -> Mrow? It cost half a tank of gas to repalce the instrument cluster?

lol, no, the before picture was taken a couple months ago. Everything on the new cluster works perfectly, except the gear indicator lights (my car is manual). I would like to get them working so P will light up when the parking brake is engages, R for reverse, 1 for 1st, 2 for 2nd, D for 3, 4, and 5, and N for when nothing else is engaged.

[Basement_Modder]

^ - -> Mrow? It cost half a tank of gas to repalce the instrument cluster?

lol, no, the before picture was taken a couple months ago. Everything on the new cluster works perfectly, except the gear indicator lights (my car is manual). I would like to get them working so P will light up when the parking brake is engages, R for reverse, 1 for 1st, 2 for 2nd, D for 3, 4, and 5, and N for when nothing else is engaged.

Do they just do nothing now? Because then it would be a matter of mounting some lever switches inside your instrument panel.

Or just offer to trade an auto CR-V speedometer assembly for a manual one on craigslist...

[vskid]

Yep, it's just there for now. I don't think there were any from a manual clusters on ebay when I bought it, or if there were, they were quite a bit more. Maybe 10-15% of CR-Vs from the right year range had manuals, my chances of finding a cluster for one are slim. Even if I had gone with a Civic cluster, most of the ones I was looking at were from automatics.
I was thinking of putting a magnet around the shifter near the base and having a reed switch for each gear that would be activated when the shifter is in it's respective gear (P and R would be switched by the "BRAKE" light and reverse lights).