The Tech Blog

Gameboy Teardown and Repair

Posted under DIY, Repair, Teardown on January 16th, 2022 by Amaldev

Launched in 1989, it’s probably one of the most iconic handheld game consoles ever created. When I was a kid, I spent quite a few hours playing Tetris and Nemesis(Plane Shooter). This is probably what improved my hand-eye coordination. I found the old Gameboy back home and it refused to turn ON. So thought of doing a teardown and repair.

The console contains a custom CPU by Sharp LR35902 clocked at 4MHz. It had 8KB of S-RAM. There is a stereo headphone jack and Piezo speaker for creating those nostalgic Nintendo sounds. The swappable cartridge gets loaded on the back and it communicates via a 32-pin connector. Communicates data via Parallel link with 16bit Address line and 8bit data lane. People over the years have done so many mods on these cartridges to make them even WiFi-enabled with ESP32.

Coming to the repair, It had 30yrs of dust and grime on it. Cleaned out every bit of it, retouched a few solder pads and voila device turns on with iconic Nintendo startup sound. But the display seems to be toasted. Displays on Gameboy’s are based on monochrome Super-twisted nematic LCDs capable of showing 4 shades of olive green. They work by aligning and twisting the Liquid crystal molecules via an electric field. Seems that the crystal layer is damaged and leaked in my unit. This is probably a no-fix till I buy a new replacement screen from AliExpress or so. There seem to a quite a lot of videos on YouTube showing a retrofit IPS display on these Gameboys to create a better high contrast screen. This console might well be one of the most modded/hacked consoles over the years.

One quirky thing about this unit is that it can be powered externally via a 6V DC barrel power supply(apart from 4 AAs). Since this was released long back, it had the issue that the centre pin was negative(which is not a norm these days). So be careful trying to power these with the latest DC power supplies. Make sure polarities are proper.

If you liked the post, Share it with your friends!

KiCad v6 Launch

Posted under DIY, Educational, Product Reviews, Technology on January 9th, 2022 by Amaldev

It’s been almost 3 years since I started using KiCad for personal and professional workflows. I slowly tried to transition away from Eagle and Altium. In the initial days, KiCad had a huge learning curve coming from other CAD tools. Getting used to the interface and workflows were really painful. Once you have gotten used to its unique quirks, it all will start to make sense. These days I mostly use KiCad for most of my development activities(Except for legacy or specific client software mandated projects).

For those of you who don’t know, KiCad is a free and Open-source software to help you with Circuit schematic design and PCB Layout. It’s rare to find great free, open-source, feature-rich CAD tools out there. KiCad for me is up there with probably Blender. If you don’t want to pay the massive licensing fee of Altium or to be under the mismanagement of Eagle software by Autodesk, KiCad is definitely a viable option.

A couple of weeks back, KiCad v6 was launched. This for me is the biggest KiCad release to date in terms of features and based on the number of users who will migrate to this version. They made a lot of things simpler, based on user feedback. This is definitely going to reduce its barrier of entry. The UI got a refresh comparable to modern software. My favourite PCB-related change is the rounded corners on PCB tracks. Most of us are used the 45-degree bend for the change of direction of a PCB trace, rounding it makes it look even better(Lesser impedance discontinuity for very high freq signals). For anyone thinking of doing a jump to KiCad for their workflow, I would say version 6 is probably the best one to learn it from scratch. It’s so much better.

PS: KiCad is going to be a CAD tool in your arsenal like any other. A CAD tool is only as good as how you can use it. It doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as you can use it well and solve your problems with it. It’s always a personal choice and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise(It will just lead to fanboy software flame wars).

If you liked the post, Share it with your friends!