I came to an impasse. It’s something we all encounter almost everyday in our workaday lives. How am I going to use my keyboard in the dark and not turn on a lamp? I felt you pain and decided that I needed to do something about it. I really wanted to make it as compact as possible so a reduction of wires was key. Since I had a keyboard with an extra USB port on one side I decided that that was the easiest and most accessible power source.
I did a little research and found that USB outputs 5V @ 100 mA. That seemed like more than I needed to make this project work.
Here is a little circuit and math work. It’s actually a lot easier than it looks.
This is the circuit working on a protoboard being powered by the keyboard.
There is the finished circuit on a cheap Radio Shack circuit board.
I just used some sticky putty to adhere it to the underside of my keyboard trade. You can’t see it without being under the desk so outer housing was not essential.
Here is the finished product! Does its job very well.
Total cost of the projects ran about $20 with LEDs, resistors, and PC board. The USB cable was just one I had lying around in my basement. I have since added a switch as well so I could always leave it plugged in. I don’t know why that didn’t cross my mind until after I built it. Fun little project and very useful.
This entry is going up a little later than I would have liked to to go up, but I guess late is better than never, right? This past spring break I made some projects for myself to try to hone some skills that I plan on utilizing for my career later in life. Not only that, but some of them were fairly practical. One such project was modifying my American NES to play audio from enhanced Japanese Famicom carts. I had a previous post explaining the whole thing. Here’s a Cliffs Notes of the whole thing. In Japan, on the Famicom (NES, but Japanese), there was an extra pin that allowed developers to make their own enhancement chips to mix into the audio. This was not put into the NES when it came to America because there were much stricter policies for publishing games and it only allowed for the use of a handful of chips to be used.
Step one for the whole thing to work is to acquire a Famicom to NES converter, and a game that used a sound enhancement chip. Luckily, I had both of these already so now I just had to figured out how the whole thing worked. To my unsurprised I found that this modification was already done many times and pretty detailed information was already given on it.
The process included taking the audio out pin from the adapter and passing it through a 100k ohm resistor and a 4.7 μF capacitor then to the R9 resistor on the NES main board. The resistor and capacitor help with the volume in the mixing because without them the extra audio channels added in would be too loud and we wouldn’t hear any of the default audio channels.
Let’s get this party started.
Top of the NES board
Wire soldered to R9 (labeled on the top of the board)
Wire Soldered to pin 16 of the adapter cart
I wanted to make sure it worked before I soldered it on a board
You can see the finished board by the power button
While I was in there I was wondering if there were any other mods I could do. I found out by just knocking out pin 4 of the infamous “lock-out chip” I could disable it. Technically you are supposed to connect pin 4 to ground, but almost everything I read said that leaving it floating is fine. This chip was supposed to keep any old company from making games without going through Nintendo (greedy bastards!). Of course many companies found a workaround for the chip, most famously Tengen. Tengen actually finagled the information from the US Copyright Office and reverse engineered a solution. They were sued outright. Why would I care about disabling the lock-out chip? Well, if you are an NES gamer and remember back to when the thing used to reset constantly and you would have to take the cart out and blow on it and stick it back in. That is the lock-out chips doing. If the pin that loaded the data to tell the lockout chip, “Hey, I’m legit, let me play.” didn’t connect the game wouldn’t load. If you were a kid who grew up on this, you absolutely know what I am talking about.
Here is the death of the lock-out chip.
The finished product.
Here is a video of the proof. VRCVII audio coming out of the NES. Success!
I want to modify it to use a 3.5mm plug and input, but I will save that for another time.
I have a couple more projects I have been working on and will post them shortly.
Lets start off by saying that hell is feeling a might chilly today. Can you guess why? Well if you haven’t heard (or cared to hear) Final Fantasy XIII is coming to Xbox 360. I honestly didn’t think it would happen; Sony is known for having an iron grip on its franchise exclusives. I will tell you that I couldn’t be more excited. I have been a fan of the series for quite some time now and I thought I might have to miss out this console generation. Square Enix and Microsoft came through for me. I haven’t been so into an E3 for about 4 years since they began cutting down. It is good to feel the anticipation is back.
Here is the E3 Trailer of Final Fantasy XIII
In other news my favorite video game of all time is getting a DS remake. It is basically the same game it was on the SNES, but with dual screen functionality and it’s portable. I guess they are tossing in a few added goodies as well. I can’t tell you how excited about this. I mean this game is the pincacle of gaming for me. It has a deep story, all the characters have depth and with many multiple endings it takes away some of the linearity that Squenix RPGs are known for. Squenix is really getting on my good side lately.
Squee!
With all this video game news I thought it would be a good time to post pics of my painted 360 faceplate. I decided my all white 360 was in need of a face lift. I decided the theme would be the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars (like that took any time to decide.
Here is the inspiration. A rebel flag.
I decided to flesh out the image and see if I could transfer the general idea to the faceplate. Here is the mock up image.
After two weeks and many, many coats of paints. I arrived at my finished product. I am happy with the way it turned out. What do you guys think?
A couple posts back I mentioned my self improvement plan via Excel and I promised to post results of my progress. I have been keeping up with it I promise. The results with grades are…sub-par to say the least, but at least it shows improvement. I would also like to say that I have not bit my nails for an entire week, and I will say that I am starting to get the shakes. I am going to get a manicure if I can break it. I know that sounds a little girly, but I don’t care. These nails have gone through hell over these past 20 years and they deserve a little pampering.
The last thing I have to post is a picture I took while picking up milk at Meijer today. There is just something wrong with the sales pitch.
Cookies?
*Edit*
I watched serenity last night and there is a tremendously bad ass scene at the end with a finish pose that was begging to be made into a wallpaper, so I did just that. It’s in wide screen only right now, but request if you would like a different aspect ratio.
