Category Archives: making

Gameboy Color Pi Emu

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time was make a handheld Gameboy emu.  It’s been done many times before.  For whatever reason recently I stumbled on XodusTech’s build, and felt really inspired by his set up so I started making one.  <grin>Oddly close to how they did theirs</grin>.  Here’s some pics.  So far some differences are I’m using a Gameboy color (instead of pocket).  It was what was cheap and broken on eBay.  Also I’m using a Pi model A instead of B.   I don’t need 2 USB ports or ethernet, and rather have the lower current consumption.  Also while I have plenty of Teensy’s around, I think I’m going to try using GPIO for my buttons instead of using the Teensy, shaves a few bucks off the BOM and lowers the current consumption even more.

It’s not quite done yet, I’m pretty close to finishing it.

Anyhoo, here’s some pics.

Building a large bristle bot with my son

2013-06-30 18.47.59In the spirit of being a maker-dad, my son got this bristle-bot kit for christmas.  A little preemptive since he was only 2 and a half.  Well he is 3 now and been carrying around the box screaming robot for awhile — I thought it was time we put it together.

 

 

2013-06-30 17.57.32

 

He’s pretty amp’d up about putting this together.

 

 

 

 

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What I’ve been up to redux

Again I’ve been ignoring my personal projects for the chipKIT design challenge. Our entry (with a few guys from my hackerspace) is a KeeLoq shield, and Key Fob. Design Files / Firmware / Libraries are available here on github.

If you would like to vote for us, go here. Our Entry Number is ck765.

Here’s the video entry for the shield.

 

The (re)Birth of a synth!

2013-04-04 02.22.25I decided to dust off a project that I’ve been working on-and-off for over a year now.  Just to introduce it really fast…  I’m taking a vintage sound generation chip, the YM2149F or AY-3-8910 and giving it a modern upgrade.  First thing I did was see how hard it would be to add a MIDI interface to it.  I was able to create a USB MIDI stack, and map notes of the chip to MIDI notes, then I thought it would be cool to add hardware MIDI as well.  I’ve created most of the things in the MIDI world to equivalents on the chip.  Most of the noise generation and ADSR envelope filters are implemented as CC commands.  Pitch-bend works, velocity is toggleable via DIP switch (and just really does a volume, I personally don’t like velocity implemented this way).  And volume works.  I’ve been able to use fruity loops to create some cool retro sounding music.  Then it dawned on me that I didn’t even implement the most obvious feature!  Streaming old chiptunes!  With the help of The Leonard Homepage I used his open source emulation app to hack into my device and just stream the registers to the chip, producing really awesome music!

I’m looking to make this a kit for other people to experience, so I was going over the assembly instructions last night.  I need to work on documentation, some code fixes, and to order a buncha parts first so its not quite ready but… soon enough. I’ll see if I can throw a video up soon.