Gameboy Color Cartridge LED Mod Guide

Trying to get homebrew running on your PSP? Want to add a screen light to your Game Boy? Trying to figure out how to work your GP2X? By popular demand, discuss it in here! (This forum is for pre-built handhelds, NOT custom made portables!)

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Epic Lavalamp
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Gameboy Color Cartridge LED Mod Guide

Post by Epic Lavalamp » Sun Apr 24, 2011 10:42 am

Here's a quick little guide on how to add a couple of led's to a GBC cartridge.

First, you're going to want to add just a little bit of solder to one of the blue contacts and one of the red contacts in the second picture below. Red is ground and Blue is VDD.

The current going through the cartridge is 5 Volts, so make sure you use correct resistors for your led's.

Since I used 2 3.3v blue led's, I needed a 47ohm resistor, and it worked out perfectly. I would recomend using the resistor on the VDD b/c there is a little more room. (if you don't know how to calculate what resistor you need, use this: http://diy.sickmods.net/Tutorials/Case_ ... alculator/ Though this site is very useful, I would just use this to figure out what resistor you want then head over to ebay to buy, everything is cheaper on ebay :mrgreen:)

I used a small piece of PCB to wire everything b/c I think soldering to them is easier than soldering wire to wire, but it is NOT needed, so don't worry if you don't have any.

Once you've wired everything together, I wouldn't be afraid to use electrical tape on any of your handywork, better to be safe than have a short.

If you have any questions, just comment and I can help.

Here are the pics:
Image
Image
Image
Image

Here's a link to a video with this mod completed and what it looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXpmhyk5 ... 3130EC4105
Last edited by Epic Lavalamp on Thu Mar 21, 2013 8:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

hexary
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Re: Gameboy Color Cartridge LED Mod Guide

Post by hexary » Sun May 01, 2011 12:40 am

cool! I showed this to my friend (who has a pokemon crystal too) and he did it just then. it looks nice irl!

Kodi3
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Re: Gameboy Color Cartridge LED Mod Guide

Post by Kodi3 » Fri Dec 07, 2012 11:10 pm

Im a complete noob so excuse the ignorance please. I dont have PCB so would I need 2 seperate resistors for each LED or could I connect one wire from each LED to the one resistor? Im guessing that will work considering thats whats going on with the board, but I dont have a clue so I need confirmation before I attempt.

ProgMetalMan
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Re: Gameboy Color Cartridge LED Mod Guide

Post by ProgMetalMan » Sun Dec 09, 2012 9:10 pm

Well, as long as you hook the resistor up to the POSITIVE ends of both LED's, I think it would work.
ShockSlayer wrote:Proggy's right.
ttsgeb wrote:mfw prog was not only right, but 100% so.

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