RunnerPack wrote:
Vaughanabe13 wrote:
RunnerPack wrote:
I wasn’t trying to give Jake a hard time…Well it seemed you were giving him a hard time, basically making him feel inferior to you when you were at that age.
I’m not sure where you got that, since I didn’t refer to myself at all in this thread
I actually compared him to a then-14-year-old Malawian “boy” who built a windmill generator… out of garbage… during a nation-wide famine… by looking at pictures in a library book(!).
Being interested in the VB doesn’t automatically make you interested in electronics and such…
…and I never even implied that, nor did anyone else, that I can see. I think you need to stop projecting your own insecurities onto other people
(And in case you can’t tell by the little emoticon, that last bit was a joke…)
@VirtualJockey: please speak for yourself, thank you. I was not “yankin’ his chain,” I was trying to get him to improve himself; to see himself as capable and useful, which he obviously took to heart since he’s already learned how to solder!
Way to go, Jake! I hope you don’t stop at fixing Teleroboxer. I hate to say it, but I kinda hope your VB’s displays start glitching to force you to do the permanent fix
NO, WAIT, I TAKE IT BACK, NOOOOOOO!
Sorry sorry, got your post and someone else’s post confused. I’ll just stop talking now, this thread has gone way off track.
RunnerPack wrote:
I wasn’t trying to give Jake a hard time, and I certainly wasn’t “ragging on the kid for not knowing how to solder and such”. I was merely pointing out his lack of self esteem and showing him an example of what someone with a “can-do” attitude… can doeven with limited resources.
I wasn’t suggesting that he should already know how to design and manufacture commercial grade electronic devices that work the first time they’re powered up. But I do think soldering is a handy skill to have (especially if one is the owner of a game console requiring as much maintenance as the Virtual Boy) and well within the physical, mental, and (almost certainly) financial faculties available to him.
@gunpeiyokoifan: no time like the present! Go find everything about or produced by Jeri Ellsworth; then get a cheap iron, some solder, some old electronics nobody wants (clock-radios are fun, as are old PC cards, mice, etc.), and some good tutorial videos.
Well it seemed you were giving him a hard time, basically making him feel inferior to you when you were at that age. Being interested in the VB doesn’t automatically make you interested in electronics and such…
T-SqProductions wrote:
Maybe I could offer my services as a graphics designer for the label?
Your offer is appreciated but as of right now I don’t have any plans to make a case for the board. I haven’t thought very much about making it look presentable at this point, it’s all about getting it to work. But I’m always willing to take suggestions on how to make it look good.
I think some of you need to calm down and stop ragging on the kid for not knowing how to solder and such. I am an electrical engineer and I didn’t learn how to solder until I was 20! It doesn’t matter how many youtube videos you watch, it’s hard to go out and buy a bunch of equipment you don’t know how to use except for watching someone else do it. It’s much easier to learn how to solder when you know someone that has an iron and you can practice without having to buy your own equipment. We don’t know this kid’s situation so just leave him alone.
Here is a pic of my first prototype board installed in the VB cart slot with the plastic cover off. As you can see, that board was made small so it could fit in the plastic cases. The new board is considerably longer and will be able to poke out the end of the VB cartridge slot. It’s almost ready to go, I just had to make a quick change and tonight I should be able to get it ordered. Feels good to be making progress again! Based on the current pricing it costs me about about 65-75 USD to make a single board with all components (not bulk pricing). Also, more good news – I found multiple alternate suppliers for my bus transceiver chip, so I won’t have to do a redesign any time soon for that reason.
See the link for pic and more in-depth update info:
http://brennanthl.wordpress.com/
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This reply was modified 14 years, 4 months ago by
Vaughanabe13.
e5frog wrote:
How will you prevent wobbling up and down if it’s a “naked” cart?If you would add some more length, enough for it to peek out of the opening you could add a semi-circle grip cut in, like the profile of this cart:
This fab house uses thick boards with very little to no flex. These things are built solid, trust me. When it’s in the VB it will be inside the plastic cartridge slot which will give it support and prevent it from bouncing around. The connector also has to be a good fit but I think I found some that work well (and fit tight!).
The only thing I will have to worry about with a bare PCB is ESD protection, in case someone accidentally gives the board a shock. I can make sure the board components are protected but does anyone (dogP?) know if the VB cartridge header has any ESD protection? Obviously it would be unacceptable to accidentally shock the cartridge and have it damage the VB. Perhaps I could use a conformal coat on the PCB to prevent touching the the traces/components.
Oooh, pretty new screen! The design passes and I just need to add a few more decoupling caps, clean up some of the messy traces and verify the part packages and it’s ready to go to the fab house!
mbuchman wrote:
If you are cheap and don’t want to pay for the extra pcb, then you could make a “pull out ring” by bending a paperclip into a “C” shape and put two vias in the PCB to solder the paperclip to. If the PCB is at least the same size as a regular VB game then inserting should be easy, and the “pull out ring” would make removing the cart easy as pie. It would probably be easier than trying to grab onto a bare PCB, unless you routed a finger hole into the exposed PCB.
Actually what I want to do is get a little rubber “grip” that I can solder to the board on the component-less section of the board. Like a rubber bar or nub that you can grip. It will face down while it’s in the VB so it won’t interfere with the cartridge slot plastic, and it would be easy to grab with your thumb and finger to pop the board out. I don’t know if I’ll find anything like that but I have an idea of what I want. These suggestions are great though, keep em coming.
Also I’m working on the board right now and for time’s sake I’m going to make the prototype fairly beefy so I can spend more time on actually getting the thing working and less time on designing the board. I can optimize that later. I’m hoping by the end of tonight I’ll have a board I can ship out and get back in a couple weeks.
e5frog wrote:
I agree, when you have a working prototype and when you’re going to make the final board there needs to be some part to grip to get it out of the VB.
Yeah, it will definitely be long enough to grab but I didn’t think about making a section without components, that’s a good idea! It probably won’t be too much extra as far as board costs and I’ll have more room for traces which is always good.
e5frog wrote:
Bigger board doesn’t seem like a big problem if you weren’t planning on having a shell anyway.
Agreed, but I know some people were talking about making custom cases so I wanted to try and make the board small enough anyway. Oh well.
The part that I am talking about is the bus transceiver/level shifter. I couldn’t find many other chips that did the same thing and could shift levels between 3 and 5V. However, I’ve been reading a bunch of application notes and I should be able to directly interface 3.3V and 5V logic if I use a small (150R) current limiting resistor to protect the micro. The VB will be fine because I can drive 5V logic with 3.3V. I still need a bus transceiver because I need to be able to share the bus between the VB, micro, and two SRAMs. But those parts are much more common, so a small redesign should fix this issue and make it more future-proof.
I can already tell that this board is going to have to be larger than the size of a VB cartridge, unless I go to a 4-layer board, which will cost a lot more. I would rather stay with the 2-layer design and just make it a longer board.
A little more of an update… I had a hard drive crash a few months ago but I was able to recover almost all of my VB work. On my first run of boards I had a problem with some of the package sizes so I had to make a new rev of the board. The new rev needs about 4-5 hours of tweaking before I send it out. In the mean time, I’ve gotten a notice from digikey that one of my critical parts is going obsolete, so I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with that yet. I have a small stock of them so I’m planning to power through the prototype/debug stage and then dealing with that later once I have a proof of concept working. It’s also possible my ideas won’t work on the VB (it is an old design, after all) so I might have to scrap my design and redo it on an FPGA. I hope it doesn’t get to that point, my FPGA skills are rusty.
The other problem I have is due to my broken wrist, I can’t solder, or even hold the iron very well. So unless I can find someone that can match my SMT solder skills and wants to work for free, I may have to wait. Ugh, this stupid wrist is turning into a nightmare.
I know people won’t want to hear it but development has been more or less halted because of personal stuff. And then last week I broke my wrist and had surgery so now it takes me forever to do anything on the computer. I haven’t given up on this project though.
Also, the connectors I have seem to fit snugly in the VB with no modifications. I have used other ones that I had to shave down with a dremel.
HonkeyKong wrote:
Success! The bit arrived and it was able to remove every screw, I’m amazed it was able to remove the stripped one as when I got it out it looked totally mangled, I can see no areas on it I could imagine it gripping. The bit was almost perfect, had to shave off a little bit on the sides to get to the deep screws closest to the center of the system but that only took about a minute to fix. Now to just get those displays out.
So basically, exactly what I said would happen. You should be more trusting.
Don’t worry, you’re fine. The gamebit screw can be partially stripped and still come out with a gamebit driver, since there are many grooves on the screw. I stripped mine like crazy with a modified flathead before I gave up and bought a gamebit. Once you get the gamebit you do have to tighten the screws before you loosen them. It sounds counter-intuitive but it works.
Also, the gamebit I bought was durable but too fat to fit in the deep holes so I had to shave off some metal with my dremel. After that it worked great. Good luck!
MineStorm wrote:
It is what it is
Hey, I don’t see your cart anywhere
LOL. Hey, I was giving your cart a compliment! I was just saying what you see is what you get, and there are no customizations, which is what he was asking. Sorry if it came off as rude.
I would say in general it is more fragile than most game systems because of the vibrating mirrors. Even if dropping it doesn’t damage anything it might screw up the alignment somewhere, because there are a lot of steps in the image creation that could get messed up. And of course we already know about the glitchy displays.
I think the external case of the VB is not fragile, but it’s the internals you should be worried about.
lastkill3r wrote:
Thanks! And, my question is… can it have more memory?
It is what it is. It’s a great tool for homebrew and general VB development. It’s not the same as, say, a Nintendo DS flashcart.
So what were your results then. Did it fix it?