Xeno-GC Clone Mini

Since I wasn’t satisfied with how I laid out it’s big bother, I decided to redo the board, the Xeno-GC Clone Mini is the end result. It’s about the size of a quarter dollar and twice as sexy. Check out the images above and see for yourself.

Make your own!

The mini model, like it’s big brother, uses 0805 SMD components. No rework station or solder paste required; Just a standard soldering iron and some whiskey (Ok, the whiskey is optional).

Parts

• 2x 100nF 0805 ceramic capacitors.
• 2x 1kΩ 0805 resistors.
• 2x 330Ω 0805 resistors.
• 1x 100Ω 0805 resistor.
• 1x Red 0805 LED.
• 1x Green 0805 LED.
• 1x Atmel AVR ATmega8L 32-pin TQFP.

Order

You can order your boards directly from (OSH Park)[http://oshpark.com/shared_projects/XDNLoePV]. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Now go get your homebrew on!

So is it worth it ordering from China based ITeadStudio versus tried and tested OSH Park? Watch the video and find out!

I’ll be giving away some Raspberry Pi PSU PCBs, subscribe and/or comment on YouTube for a chance to win your own!

It works!

Populated PCBs

Here’s the Raspberry Pi R3 PCB TH (Through-Hole) model fully populated.

The R3 board is shared on OSH Park which means you can order your own boards which you can assemble yourself!

Components

Here’s the current layout and component values.

All parts are fairly common, specially the passives. Here are a few suppliers for the parts you may have a hard time finding.

ATTiny85

SparkFun: COM-09378

Mouser: 556-ATTINY85-20PU

Programming

You will need a way to program the ATTiny, I suggest getting yourself an Atmel AVR mkII, a Pocket AVR Programmer or if you already own an Arduino you can make an ArduinoISP.

LD33V

SparkFun: COM-00526

Mouser: 511-LD1117V33

TIP125

Mouser: 511-TIP125

PN2222

Adafruit: 756

Mouser: 512-PN2222ABU

Resources

OSH Park: http://oshpark.com/shared_projects/MmabtNcO

I received my Raspberry Pi PSU Revision 2 PCBs in the mail last week and I got a chance to populate and test them during the weekend.

The R2 board is shared on OSH Park which means you can order your own boards and assemble for yourself.

Components

Here’s the board, fully populated and with all the parts values highlighted.

All parts are fairly common, specially the passives. Here are a few suppliers for the parts you may have a hard time finding.

ATTiny85

SparkFun: COM-09378 Mouser: 556-ATTINY85-20PU

Programming

You will need a way to program the ATTiny, I suggest getting yourself an Atmel AVR mkII, a Pocket AVR Programmer or if you already own an Arduino you can make an ArduinoISP.

LD33V

SparkFun: COM-00526 Mouser: 511-LD1117V33

TIP125

Mouser: 511-TIP125

2N2222A

Mouser: 511-2N2222A Digi-Key: 497-2598-ND

OBSOLITE R3 replaces this component with the 2N3904 and PN2222

Resources

OSH Park: http://oshpark.com/shared_projects/clqtxZaD Video: http://youtu.be/xgsn7Mpjh7g

PCBs

I’ve recently received the first and second revisions of my Raspberry Pi – PSU Through-Hole PCB. They came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

There are a couple of issues with the R1 and R2 designs that have already been addressed in R3, but since the R3 is not here yet, let’s populate an R2 board and test it out.

We will need to start with the power rail. It’s pretty straight forward – Just like my original prototype, the board takes in 5V which is used to power the Raspberry Pi directly. The micro-controller is powered by a 3v3 rail (hence the LD33V), this reduces power consumption but more importantly makes the micro compatible with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO.

Programming

After I filled in the power stage, I proceeded to flash the micro using my MKII and some pogo pins.

I tested the board and since it all checked out fine, I proceeded to populate the rest of the components.

Moment of Truth

I pulled out one of my RPis and hooked up the fully populated PSU.

No blue smoke came out, which is always good, hooray! :)

Revision 3

The third revision of the PSU PCB has already been sent to the fab and is under production at the moment of writing, I’ll record a video as soon as I get it showing how it works and how you can build your own!

Update

I got my Rev3 board in, check it out by clicking the link below:

Make your own Raspberry Pi – PSU [R3]

OSHW

The source code, schematic and board layout for this project is publicly available on GitHub.

GitHub Repository

I’ve added a new branch to rpi-buildroot. The 3.8 branch uses the new 3.8.6 Linux kernel provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This distro is based on Buildroot, that means it very flexible and well suited for numerous customized embedded linux applications. Makers will find it extremely useful since it can be used to create powerful custom deployments – Want to control a robot using a Raspberry Pi? then this is the distro for you – Please keep in mind that the default configuration builds a system with nothing more than the bare essentials.

Please checkout the README file for more information.

You may download the test-drive SD-card image here: http://dl.guillermoamaral.com/rpi/sdcard-3.8.img.xz (user root – no password)

How to build it yourself!

How to flash

I found this little console while lounging around a Walmart as I waited for a movie to start at the cinema. I should point out it was a Mexican Walmart, I’m not sure if the US ones would/could actually carry this little device since it has plenty of probably unlicensed ROMs lurking inside it’s crappy interior. Priced at 10 USD (120 MXN) who could resist!

After purchasing it, kids kept walking up to me and asked about the console, clearly excited about all the old-school games inside. They where aware it was not a PS3 or an XBOX 360, they didn’t care, it was true 8-bit love. I have to admit, that made me very happy.

Taredown

I started by removing the easily accessible screws underneath the console.

Exposing what I pretty much expected, an extremely simple system held together with hot glue.

From this angle you can tell that the two single sided boards on each end are just breakout boards for the different connectors required by the system; with the exception of the L7805CV regulator and it’s accompanying decoupling capacitors.

The boards seem to have been screen printed, the traces also look a little oddly shaped. If you look closely, you can still see quite a lot of flux residue, dirty.

The other board doesn’t look any better sadly. Also, they went and soldered all the TH components and jumpers on the bottom side. Not really sure why…

The top side of the main board looks pretty much as you would expect, one big cartridge slot, what looks like a 21 Mhz crystal oscillator and a few capacitors.

The real action is on the bottom. It looks to be some sort of chip-on-board design, this little guy in the middle is why I took so long to post this tare down; I wanted to maybe try to dissolve the epoxy but I kept getting distracted by work. In the end I decided against it, since I don’t have a powerful enough microscope for it to really be worth busting out the acid.

Bonus

The cartridge seems to be another breakout-like board for what looks to be a NAND flash. I’m going to try to get some data off the flash memory, I’ll post and update when and if I’m successful. :)

What now?

I’m going to put it back together and give it away to the first kid to walk up to me at the mall next week. :)

I’m back from another great Southern California Linux Expo, I’m quite happy with the turnout to both the Marshmallow booth and my talk. I got tons of positive feedback, beer, magic shows and game ideas; one of my favorites involved hunting down Bill Gates with drones (a reverse Duck Hunt if you will).

I had some schwag for the event, this included t-shirts, bookmarks, stickers, buttons and random booth paraphernalia. Most of which was gone by Sunday morning due to a herd of middle-schoolers that swamped the booth on Saturday.

People kept trying to buy the booth Marshmallows off me, I guess I will have to make some extra ones for next year. :)

Talk

I was surprised to see that the room was packed when I walked in about 10 minutes prior to show time. It went well considering I lost my voice earlier that week. My throat was killing me since I had to go mic-less due to some “technological differences” (Idiocracy, 2006), I was worried it was going to start bleeding, luckily it didn’t.

If you’re interested in trying out the demo used during my talk, it’s available in both 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Linux. Simply extract and execute the “run” script found inside the resulting marshmallow_demo directory.

The demo requires a recent version of the Linux kernel along with a working OpenGL setup.

Thank You

I’d like to thank the SCaLE organizers for their support and I hope we get invited back next year. I’ll leave you with a quote from an email I got soon after arriving home.

Yours was my favorite booth at SCALE; low budget, and I got to learn about something I hadn’t heard of before. Keep up the good work on the project! -Jim Garrison

Mission

I recently found myself with a surplus of Adafruit Industries components, I decided to put a few of them to good use by making a custom NES controller.

Objectives

• Use a thru-hole 5-way navigation switch.
• Use some square tactile buttons.
• Create a custom Eagle device for the navigation switch.
• Use a strip of SMD 0603 10k resistors.
• Use a single-sided 65×65 MM square board (since I have a bunch of them).

Design

The design is fairly simple, the only difference between it and a standard controller would be the use of the Center pin on the navigation switch as the Select button.

PCB

I had to resort to using quite a lot of jumper wires since the board is pretty small, it should also work fine on a double sided board (just not very efficiently).

Replace the bottom layer (blue lines) with jumper wire.

Results

The controller works great! Though it could use some routing to make it more comfortable.

Back – Start Button

Front

Use

Well I finally decided to close down Webbaverse, it had a good run but my attention has been stolen by other endeavours (including but not limited to my game console). When I record new podcasts in the future they will be posted here on my site and perhaps on HPR.