Of all the build requests the team receive on the element14 Community, there has been one that has repeatedly came up: Build a Nintendo 64 portable! The Ben Heck Show team has finally decided to give it a go, starting with the Nintendo 64 that was tore down in the Console Wars episode. As unforgiving as the N64 hardware is, Ben is going to manipulate the components to make the portable fully featured, while Felix gets the battery management up and running.

In this episode, Ben miniaturizes the controller using an Arduino Pro Micro and Playstation Vita analog stick, embeds the RAM expansion, and works on a case design with a nod to the Nintendo Switch. The N64 is notorious for being difficult to hack as it’s easily damaged due to all the rewiring required to make it smaller!

Humans by nature can be more than a little bit wasteful, thanks to the introduction of recycling we can minimize this a little, but some things are too good to throw away! Now a new trend is beginning: Upcycling! Karen has the idea to repurpose laptop screens to create a Legend of Zelda inspired lamp, however not just any laptop screen will do. As the team rip apart old hardware they soon discover the different types of screens which have been used in old personal computer laptops and Apple MacBooks over the years. With the correct screens identified, Karen gets down to business with Adobe Illustrator and designs suitable laser cut frames, watch the episode to find out the little tips and tricks to make the perfect design!

Get a window into the world of the Ben Heck Show MST3K style! The team is now focused on longer term builds to ensure a more robust design and detailed build! With this in mind, the team looks back on previous builds, and makes plans to build them again from the ground up! Could they actually bring one of these builds to market? The Ben Heck Team is now going to focus on polishing off one large project as a long term build to bring onto the market as a product. What better way to help determine which one to make than by critiquing past builds, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style?! Join Ben, Karen and Max as they talk over snippets from each episode and what it was like behind the scenes, including: the guitar controller mod, the teensy pinball portable, real life Minecraft blocks, all seeing eye hat, the Hackmanji build and the great glue gun! Find out which project has won based on the poll on the element14 Community. Take a look at the builds they considered: Felix Hacks a Guitar: http://bit.ly/2mf91IY Teensy Pinball Portable Pt 1: http://bit.ly/2lRBTXb Crowdsourced Can Crusher Pt 1: http://bit.ly/2mktRDU Parallax Sensor Seeing-Eye Hat: http://bit.ly/2lh3mhv Live Action Minecraft Blocks Pt 1: http://bit.ly/2msm71E Take a look at the poll that decided one of those builds: Help the Ben Heck Team Decide: http://bit.ly/2lgKteQ

The Ben Heck Team announces a major change on the show after receiving a lot of interest from community members who would like to see more detail in each episode and longer term builds. By focusing on three long term builds they can give community members what they want to see, a more robust design and detail build. In this episode you’ll see which builds they will be focusing on over the course of the next year and set the stage for their next major challenge in the evolution of the show. Visit the Ben Heck page on the element14 community: http://bit.ly/2m3bxkf Great Glue Gun Episode: http://bit.ly/2miPpTt Hackmanji Episode: http://bit.ly/2lm9MjH Teensy Pinball Portable Episode: http://bit.ly/2mm4HHP Over the next year the Ben Heck Team will be focusing on three long term builds. Two were chosen by Ben while a third was chosen by community members by a poll.

We don't know why Ben does the things that he does sometimes, but he keeps on licking. Discover what we mean as Ben, Karen and Felix tear down the new Nintendo Switch games console and Joy Con controllers. How does it compare to a laptop or tablet computer? Is it designed for easy maintenance or upgradeability? Karen and Ben examine the new Nintendo Switch as they decide what to take part first. Buttons are closer to size of the DS. There’s Phillips screw on the sides and tri-wing screws on the back. It’s thicker than your average modern tablet which is good because you get more power, more battery, and an active cooling unit. Tablets/smartphones passively cool themselves (no fans or vents). There’s a USBC you can get video out of and a kickstand that allows you to put more memory in it. There’s a light tunnel on the console that allows LEDs inside the controller to go through that light tunnel and illuminate out the front. The power supply has both 5 volts and 15 volts. It uses the 15 volts for fast charging and when it’s running in docked mode. Ben takes apart the docking stage to it. It contains 2 USB 2 ports and a USB 3 on the inside. USBC has six differential pairs of data (HDMI only has 4) and multiple power/ground lines to allow high power charging. Inside the board contains a USB 3.0 hub controller. The ribbon cable connects to the USB-C port that docks into the switch. The dock is designed to allow the Switch to run faster since it doesn’t have to worry about battery life.

The Ben Heck Team re-imagines one of Ben Heck’s favorite tools, the glue gun to being work on a prototype for a super glue gun. They get started by tearing apart a bunch of glue guns to find the one that is closest to the one they want to build. The plan is to find one that’s closest to the one they want to use that as their inspiration. Ben and Felix tear down a bunch of glue guns to look for a heating element that’s close to what they want. The blue gun Felix takes apart is fixed temperature while the red gun that Ben takes apart is dual temperature. They hook up a multimeter to get the resistance of the coil and figure out how much current it will draw using Ohm’s law. They’re looking for one winding where they can pulse it to change the temperature. Down the road they’re hoping to find self-contained heating elements. There are two coils in the glue gun. If you pass the current through both of them there’s more resistance which means it uses less current which means its cooler. If you flip the switch and bypass one of them current flows through just one which makes it hotter. Because AC voltage can vary a few volts by geographic location they hook it up to a Kill a Watt to double check the math on the voltage. The Kill a Watt tells you how much energy whatever is plugged in is consuming. Ben finds a glue gun close to the one they want to build. There’s only a single winding so one pair of wires that go to the heater block and then there’s another pair of wires going into the thermistor. The temperature control is done with a potentiometer which is close to what they want to do. It contains a BT135-600 glass passivated triac. The triac is the most commonly used semiconductor device for switching and power control of AC systems. The triac can be switched on by either a positive or negative gate pulse regardless of the polarity of the AC supply at that time. They go to work figuring out how to control it with a DC logic circuit

The Ben Heck Team begin mapping out the Logic Gate Game by considering its purpose, areas for improvement, reducing costs to build to scale, and materials to be used. Ben uses a PIC microcontroller with plenty of I/O, wires up a breadboard, and uses ChipKit to quickly roll out code. The team needs your help deciding on an LCD screen and a microcontroller with enough IO to connect with all the plugs! Ben and Karen begin by mapping out a plan for their prototype using a diagram from a previous build. They get rid of FLIP-FLOP, COUNTER, NAND, and NOR and keep AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. They can make NAND and NOR using the NOT gates. Each game set will come with 10-20 jumper wires to keep costs reasonable. Ben and Karen offer different perspectives on how best to set up a learning game and who their target audience will be. Next, it’s time to Ben and Felix to make a test circuit. Ben takes out a PIC32 starter kit with plenty of IO on it. You program these with Microchip’s MPLB X IDE which can be found online. If they’re able to find a microcontroller with enough I/O they could conceivably simulate all the logic gates. The other option would be to use an external I/O expander. The idea is to use a line of female headers and another line of male headers to crudely simulate their logic gate connections and then trying to do a state machine loop MPlab to get it to simulate what they want. Before going for it with MPlab, Ben first uses the Arduino ChipKit IDE to make things easier so he can roll out a quick example. The ChipKit uses a PIC32MX795F512L which has plenty of I/O to test. Ben wires up the breadboard and writes some code. They’re writing the logic gates in code instead of using IC’s.

In this episode The Ben Heck Team takes a look at the original pinball machine so they can rebuild it as their final long term project for the year. The original Mini Pinball machine was built to a 1:2 scale of an actual pinball machine but there wasn’t very good control to prevent the ball from flying all over the place. The original mini pinball machine used a Teensy 3.2 MCU and a lot of hand-soldered components. The major parts in the original unit are a battery, an audio SD card that could be replaced with the 12-bit DAC built into Teensy 3.6, a volume knob that can be removed, and a start button that can be removed as well. After analyzing the original pinball machine, Ben and Felix test out 8 different sizes of balls. The original ball they used for their pinball machine was too light and floaty. The surface mounted MOSFET Ben looks at is n-channel 80 volts and 39 amps which should be plenty for this project. A MOSFET is a metal oxide semiconductor that can switch powerful loads. After that Ben and Felix take out there meter to measure the charge on various battery packs. Felix breaks out a breadboard to do some solenoid testing. The hope is that they can use one size of small solenoid for everything on the mini pinball. Felix goes over a circuit diagram of everything they’ve wired up. It has 12 volts coming in, the VVD has 12 volts coming in, a diode, a solenoid that goes into the drain of the MOSFET, a switch that’s going to 5 volts, 5 volts comes into the gate, and there is a 10K pulldown resistor on the gate as well that goes to ground, and then the source of the gate goes to ground. The MOSFET allows them to control high current loads with regular TTL level signals (like a MCU). While Felix mocks up a MOSFET test, Ben works on physical stuff such as what type of ball will work best. In the earlier project Ben was really hung up on making it to scale like a pinball machine but comes to realize that was a mistake because the physics d

Special guest David from the Technophiles podcast gets his hands on an NES Classic and shows it to Ben. Ben addresses one of the biggest shortcomings of the NES Classic by showing you how to extend the controller and hook it up to an oscilloscope to check the integrity of the signals! He’ll also show you what’s inside the box and do a tear down of the hard to find retro console! The first thing The Ben Heck Team did was unbox the NES mini. They found some manuals, a poster of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, some power and HDMI cords, the controller, and the unit itself. Following the unboxing of the NES Classic Ben does a teardown of the controller and the unit itself. The controller uses a single sided PCB to save money. There’s power, ground, serial data, and serial clocks. They’ll be looking at the signals from this using the oscilloscope. David also brought his Wii Pro Controller to try with the system and Ben takes that apart as well. It uses the same chip as the NES Mini Controller: WCP405. This means you can wire things up to the PCB of the NES Mini Controller and turn it into a pro controller. After he’s done tearing apart the controller he does a teardown of the unit itself. He discovers a heat sink and a thermal pad. The main board contains the system on a chip, hdmi, and all the power connections. There’s an ARM processor, 256 mb of RAM, 512 MB of Flash storage memory, and a power management chip. On the back there is a chip that takes a parallel RGB image data and turns it into LVDS, differential signaling for HDMI. Ben hooks the controller up to an oscilloscope to check the signals. They use the oscilloscope to read the BUS. After checking the I2C Bus on the scope Ben is confident he can extend the cord with little difficulty. Next, he hooks up the Wii Pro Controller to compare the difference. Finally, Ben looks into extending the controller cable. Ben wires an Xbox One cable to the NES Mini controller to exte

We're making progress with the Super Glue Gun project, though we've hit a problem and we need your help! To push the glue sticks into the gun, we need motor control. For this we're prototyping with ATTiny24, Arduino, TRIACs, and testing different motors, such as stepper motors. It can be tricky, first the team have to identify how much power they use depending on how much effort it needs to turn, and control them using an Arduino. Unfortunately, there are unforeseen consequences!

Taking advantage of Karen's laser cutting design skills and Felix's soldering, the team created a prototype of the logic board game using Karen's magnetic clasp design. Now it's time to give the concept a test-run with help from JT Smith, proprietor of The Game Crafter, whose experience in game design includes games such as "The Captain is Dead". JT informs the team that creating a game which is educational and fun is one of the most difficult concepts to pull off. Usually there needs to be some compromise on the design, but where? While Karen contemplates JT's input, Ben and Felix hack at an LCD display with the Pic32 Microcontroller and a DE0-Nano FPGA, hopefully this will lead to a game design that doesn’t rely solely on LEDs!

Ben continues rebuilding the flipper mecs to get an idea how they can work with the smaller solenoids while Felix continues working on the Teensy 3.1, a popular microcontroller based on Freescale system on a chip. Felix is going to try and get the DAC working, the digital to analog converter, so they can get it to play music and sound effects.

It’s been almost a year since the Team met Terry Diebold and his Nintendo-Playstation prototype at the 2016 MGC (Midwest Gaming Classic). They have a month to give it back to him at the next Midwest Gaming Classic and their goal is to have it back to him in working condition. There are two digital-to-analog converters (DACs) on the prototype. One of them is for the Super Nintendo side and one of them is for the CD ROM side. They are muxed together after that. DACs take digital streams and turn them into analog signals – audio in this case. Ben has the prototype hooked up to an Oscilloscope so he can take a closer look at it. He checks the signal for the music from Super Mario Kart and is able to determine that the Super Nintendo DAC is working. The CD rom DAC, which is side by side with the SNES DAC, is not working however. Ben’s been doing some mapping of the schematic and thinks he knows what a mystery chip does. Its probably some sort of BUS location decoder chip. Someone has mapped out what data you send out from the expansion port. The chip let’s you talk to other chips on the board based on what type of register is sent out. Ben continues mapping out the chip in order to give him more points from which to test things. After replacing several questionable capacitors off-camera and jiggling some things around, Ben returns to the shop to find that CD ROM on the Nintendo-Playstation prototype is suddenly working. On the board there is a CD ROM controller chip, a digital signal processor, and there’s also a microprocessor on a connected board. When the system is not in game mode, the microcontroller on the connected board tells the CD ROM controller on the motherboard what to do (such as play music). Ben checks the ribbon cables and takes measurements from the three potentiometers on the driver board for the disc. Ben attempts to get a disc to boot up a game disc. A SNES program is sending commands to the NEC microcontroller, telling it

The team gets back to work on the Super Glue Gun. Previously they worked on controlling the heating element with a triac and controlling the motor while extruding the glue through it. The team gets help from a community member who returns a previous super glue gun build to Ben.

Previously, the team worked on the triac to control the hot end, extruding glue through the hot end, and finding the best DC motor and drive gear to push the glue to the hot end. In this episode, the team is going to make another test rig using a slightly faster DC gear motor and get started on programming the ATtiny microcontroller that will drive everything in the glue gun. Ben finds a DC motor with the same form factor as the one he used before, but its 50 rpm instead of 3 rpm. The mounting is different so he goes into Autodesk Fusion 360 to design a 3D Printed mount. Ben exports his design as a DXF (Drawing Exchange Format) so he can cut a paper pattern on the laser, make sure the holes are correct, and once that done he can print it. The paper pattern is way off so it was good thing he started this way than with a 3D print. It takes many tests to get the right dimensions. After 3D the part and measuring the distance, the latest revision to the motor mount is a little loose so another revision is made on the 3D printed part. Once the part is dialed in, they’re going to take the glue stick and get its center point, and use that to make their guide shaft. That will get them close enough to do a test with the hot end again. 50 rpm motor gives them a lot more speed than the 3 rpm motor, however more speed means less torque so hopefully it has enough power to push the glue through the hot end. Once it seems to work, it’s time to make the next revision to the 3D printed part so they can push it through the hot end. Ben has a new board he made for ATtiny development. It’s got a larger socket on it for the ATtiny20. He’s also working on a sub socket for the ATtiny4 to give him a couple of options for what he can use. The ATtiny20, is the most likely candidate for use with the Super Glue Gun, as it gives him 6 IO. The board gives him a way to program these little chips as well, especially as they use the TPI – Tiny Programming Interface – instead o

Now it's Felix's opportunity to break the warranty on a gaming console, only, it's a bit retro. The team are taking apart the original NES, Nintendo Entertainment System for a teardown and repair with tips and tricks on how to make sure your old console gets a new lease of life. Starting with disabling the lockout chip, which is a main cause of problems and also giving the slot loading bay care and attention snice it's one of the common failures, partly because it functions like an old VHS/VCR player! And hear more anecdotes of Ben's experience working at Funcoland (now Gamestop) and other possible mods of the NES!

n this weeks episode the team considers a library from Microchip and how the game will work. Microchip has a library that allows you to drive an LCD glass with just a microcontroller, no need for an external controller or extra RAM. They also discuss gamification; make some diagrams of how they want to space up the screen, what goes on the screen, where to put the plugs, and figure out how the puzzle is going to work on the screen. Ben attempts to use the PIC32 MZ starter kit as a mass storage device with a computer. Acting as a mass storage device, more puzzles could be added just by dragging and dropping from a computer. There are multiple USB ports on the end; there’s one if it’s a device and one if it’s a host such as your computer. Ben want’s the microcontroller to act as a device like a USB thumb drive. There’s also a programming header and a UART with a USB converter. The hope is that there will be a single USB port on the logic gate board game that can be used for charging as well as transferring data. Ben goes over programming the microcontroller using MPLAB harmony, which includes a good number of examples in its library. The problem is it doesn’t really tell you how to use them. What they can do is set up an area of NVM non-volatile memory, the flash that holds the program, and set it up as a small file system. This allows them to access it from within their program to get files. The USB could also use it as a file system so the user can put files there. Although, they may want to have separate file systems so there’s an area of memory that a person can’t destroy just plugging it into their computer. Getting examples to work isn’t that difficult, the real trick is combining them all. This includes some kind of sound, LCD, USB, and file system. After aligning the LCD screen he sets up another NOR gate using the MPLAB IDE. They need to do more work on the gamification and how the screen is going to be set up but if they can comb

Max has been playing his Nintendo Switch 24/7 since he got it, causing him to deal with a debilitating thumb cramp from the analog stick. Ben offers to 3D print an add-on for the joy con to move the analog stick to the proper position. Ben attempts to save Max from making a tragic mistake Ben takes apart the right joy con so he can reposition the analog stick. The analog stick appears to be the cheapest stick he’s come across. It works different than any he’s ever seen before. Because its unconventional, it might not be possible to replace with a standard analog stick. What they might have to do is actually take the stick and move it instead of replacing it with something else. He proposes adding a spacer but he’ll have to test to see if it works if it’s loose. Unfortunately, you need to have either both of the joy cons connected or both of them detached. The challenge that they are facing so far is that they’ll have to make a null connector on both sides so they’re connected but they’re not actually electrically connected. You lose charging capability doing that so the challenge is to design a piece that fits between the mounting point for the analog stick and then very carefully solder five wires. The joy con extension is mostly just 3D printing. The challenge they face is with the flat flex ribbon cable on the joystick itself. It’s quite thin, it’s point five millimeters pitch, pitch being the distance between centers of pins and there is a connector on the PCB that will get ruined if they try to desolder that connector we’ll probably ruin it. They also can’t solder to the flat flex ribbon cable because it’s not actually metal, it’s a conductive ink that they make the traces with. Ben orders a connector so he can plug it in to the flat flex and then manually put wires from the connector over to the PCB. They may need to trim some plastic to make for the extra connector. They’ll have to remove a connector anyways so Ben tr

It's time to code with Arduino and the Teensy 3.6 to create the game logic and sound for the Miniature Pinball machine. Using the C++ Programming language, Ben takes Felix's C code and makes it suitable for embedded microcontroller hardware with a logic state machine, this virtualised state machine monitors what is going on with the Pinball hardware, such as buttons and what the pinball touches, to react to it by increasing your score or playing music and sounds!

Ben and Felix meet with Terry from MathWorks to find out how they can use MATLAB and Simulink to create a simulation of the mini pinball table that uses an Arduino microcontroller. Terry shows how a 3D model of the table created with Autodesk's Fusion 360 can be imported into Simulink and how the ball movement within the table can be simulated. The simulation model lets the team explore how various table configurations will work without having to physically build them. The team can even play virtual games by controlling the flippers on the simulated table with an XBox One controller! Terry also shows how MATLAB and Simulink algorithms can be embedded onto Arduino and other hardware.

In this episode Felix puts together the components necessary to build an Arch Linux based media center PC for your living room. Things to consider when putting together your own computer system include cooling, wiring, airflow, and ensuring the setup properly. Felix puts together a media center worth of his TV. In today’s episode Felix will be building a media center. This will allow him to have a full blown computer under his television. Felix assembles stack of budget grade parts to keep his media center under $400. His parts include a mini ITX form factor case, an ASRock AM1H-ITX Mini ITX motherboard, an Artic M1-Passive fanless heatsink to provide passive cooling without the extra noise of a fan running, an AMD Athlon 5350 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), a 120 GB SSD from Kingston, some thermal paste for the heatsink, and finally 16 GB of DDR3 RAM from Kingston. Felix starts with the enclosure which is all metal. He then places the ASRock AM1H-ITX Mini ITX motherboard in the enclosure. He then puts in the microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices. He demonstrates how to orient the microprocessor in the motherboard. There is a locking tab to makes the connection so you don’t need to apply any pressure to it. Next, he’s ready to add the fanless heatsink to the unit. He’ll need to screw the heatsink on from underneath without smearing the grease. Once the processor is installed, it’s time to drop in some RAM. This consists of two sticks of eight gigabytes. He connects the hard drive LED power button and reset button. He also connects the audio interface and the USB for the side. He then gets the power supply installed. He considers wire management and where to mount the hard drive. He opts to install an existing harddrive he has on hand, rather than using the harddrive he was originally going to use, because it already has an operating system installed on it. Once everything is set up Felix walks you through Kodi, the Arch Linu

Today the team is getting back to the super glue gun build. Previously, they worked on the extruder, the hot and triac control, and picked a microcontroller. Now it’s time to take the foam mock up they worked on for the gun and design a PCB that will inside of the handle. Felix walks through the H-bridge testing. The H-bridge controls the motor. The input takes in 12 volts to drive the motor and the control pins make the circuit switch the terminals that are connected to the motor. In other words, the microcontroller allows the pins to switch between positive and ground. After the terminals of the motor driver are connected to the motor, Felix plugs it in to give the switch some power to turn on. He does a final test to make sure the circuit works, turning it in each direction. Ben cuts a pair of PCBs in the shape of a gun handle. He’s designing a PCB based off their foam core design, he’ll then design a 3D printed part around the PCB. He uses the cut PCB to consider placement of the hall effect sensors, the power supply, the microcontroller op-amp triac, and the h-bridge, to fit within a handle will contain a plug at the bottom for AC power. Felix picked up some regulator packages for Ben to take apart piece by piece to see what’s on them. The packages take in 110 VAC and spit out 12 and 5 volts DC. One such piece hooked up to the AC lines is a surface mount chip known as a bridge rectifier. A bridge rectifier is where you take four diodes and you use that to convert an AC voltage to a DC voltage. The other side of the bridge rectifier is still going to be 120 volts but it’ll be DC. He removes parts of the board and puts it onto his board bit by bit.

Previously, the team selected the components and made a test PCB for the inside handle. Now it’s time wire it up; attach the motor, trigger, and hot end; and program it using AVR studio to control those things and see how the glue gun works. Once they put the motor and hot end on top they’ll have their first working prototype! Ben goes into Autodesk Fusion 360 to design a few features such as a spring to push back the trigger. He’s adjusted the design to have a quarter inch holes in the trigger. What he hopes to accomplish is to build up the extruder part of this so they can actually test the whole thing. They have all the controls to drive the gun. The extruder part might not be quite so refined. He creates some symmetrical mounting points for driving a size four screw on the inside. He starts printing one half of the trigger so he can get to work on designing the other half. Ben is still working on the extruder design. It has a lot of mass to hold the silicon entry point of the nozzle. He hasn’t started on the nozzle holding yet but he shows where it is going to go. The bearing imported from McMaster Carr, a feature of Fusion 360. He adds a cap to go over the gear and shaft. The glue gun will go right down the middle. Next, it’s time to figure out how to attach the part (using a foam mock up) to the main handle. What matters is the piece’s relation to the hot end as it shows us how far the nozzle’s actually going to be. If you put the motor too far the back the gun is not going to be too short. When he has an idea of how things are going to be put into place he 3D prints the parts. Ben screws the new handle pieces together and then tests the spring. The main things that are going to go up are the motor control, the triac control for the hot end, and then the temperature control. There might be more things in the final product, such as a push button or an LED indicator, but what they have is enough for testing purposes. They test the

Karen has an idea for a project, with Felix's help to create a portable Raspberry Pi photo' booth, useful for weddings and other events. This isn't only a hardware project, it also needs the linux software to help ensure we're saving the files where we want them and even upload them to an online service! Felix takes this as an opportunity to give everyone a crash course in how to use linux on the Raspberry Pi and keep it up to date. After the design's put together, Karen talks us through her python logic to have the camera take pictures! How's your Python programming? What Pi Cam projects have you made? Or how would you have changed this one? Let us know on the element14 Community!

The team is struggling with their logic board game project so they bring on Hari, a product specialist from element14, to help them with the build. He’s going to help them assess the current state of the project and analyze whether it’s actually worth taking to completion. The logic board game is a concept the team is attempting to take from concept to product. It’s made the least progress of the three long term builds they’ve worked on this year and it’s probably gone through the most iterations. Since the last iteration, the team decided to try using toggle switches instead of plugs and wires. Hari, likes what they’re doing with the toggle switches, but has some ideas on how they can get a custom solution. They then discuss the target price they had in mind. It’s a little hard to get a firm answer on this because the team isn’t sure what this will develop into. Hari is able to tell them if the number they had in mind is matches what the market they are targeting could support. He compares what they have with something similar and they ponder how much added cost is justified by the product’s unique features. The game was originally mechanical but their decision to include a microcontroller and screen has added heavily to the production costs. This is all part of the market research that Hari wants them to do. Once you determine a product has a favorable reception with its target audience you can get a sense of what your overall demand will be. The obstacle they are facing is that whatever they build would need to also compete with games on smart phones and tablets. After Hari’s visit the team goes over what they’ve learned as a result of their effort in attempting to take a build project to market. They already knew going in that all three of their build projects probably wouldn’t succeed. With this particular project they started with a really good idea but never really fleshed it out in a detailed framework. They did

Ben, Karen, and Felix are joined by Bob Baddeley, a local electrical engineer, for their IoT on Wheels Design Challenge project. Ben works on the mechanical design in Autodesk Fusion 360, Felix gets started working with the Nucleo Board, and Bob shows them how to connect Bluetooth expansion board to an iOS app. The team is working on a device that fits onto your bicycle and communicates with your smartphone over Bluetooth LE to pass information back and forth. It will be able to send a message to an administrator if you hit a pothole, there will be an alarm built into it, vibration and tilt detection, and more. This project is for the IoT on Wheels Design Challenge on element14. They'll be using the ST microelectronics Nucleo64 along with a Bluetooth expansion module. Felix brought in a bicycle for the team to base their measurements on. Once they know how much room they have to work with Ben goes to work drafting a design in Autodesk Fusion 360. It won’t be a one size fits all solution, it will work for this Design Challenge as it will be specific to this build. They won’t be printing the tubes they are drafting, but the drawing will give them a good reference for their build. With the Fusion 360 symmetrical extrusion, you specify length from center, not the total length. After he’s done they’ll know where to put the surface of their object and where to put their mounting clamp. Felix gets started working with the Nucleo Board by going to the ARM mbed OS developer site. Clicking on compiler will take you to the online integrated development environment so you can begin working with your programs. You could install IDE’s and compiler toolchains but the online development saves you from the hassle because online development handles all of this for you. He firsts walks you through selecting the Nucleo-L476RG (Nucleo 64) as your hardware platform and then gets a blinky example going. Coding examples such as the blinky example are common whe

The N64 Portable has become the bane of Ben’s existence. Now, to the unrestrained delight of Karen, Ben finishes his N64 portable project. In search of help for his N64 Portable, Ben took it to the Midwest Gaming Classic 2017, which takes place in Milwaukee every April. There, he was united with some former Ben Heck forum members who have done a lot of work with the N64 in the past. There he leveraged their extensive experience with wiring the jumper pack. N64 used a short-lived form of RAM called RAMBUS where chips sat in series and had a terminator at the end of the chain (kind of like SCSI)! The length of the wires affected how the RAM bus was terminated so they took the original jumper pack and carefully wired it directly to the motherboard with it lying flat. This gives Ben the low profile he needs to use the original jumper pack and give him the best chance to succeed. The N64 expansion pack is detected so he knows this is working. The old N64 had a pair of 2 megabyte RAM chips on it. You can remove those and install a couple of 4 megabyte RAM chips. This basically gives you the expansion pack built in. Ben works on rewiring the cartridge as he did before. He also plans on using chunks of copper to improve the heatsink. He’s going to need to measure to find the empty spots, measure the height of the chips, as well as the thermal pads. He can then CNC mill a custom copper heatsink to bolt onto the board for maximum heat dissipation. He’s also got some really tiny fans to move some air around. The RAM actually gets hotter than the CPU/GPU. It runs fast to make up for the narrow bus width (9 bits). Ben goes to work on desoldering and rewiring the cartridge slot. He’s getting closer to desoldering the cartridge slot, he’s removed the metal shielding so the only thing holding it in place are the data pins themselves. He uses tweezers to see if the pins can be moved. If they can be moved that means it’s been completely desoldered. He can t

The team are on the road with the IoT on Wheels design challenge to make their bicycle smarter. Using ST Microelectronics Nucleo hardware with Bluetooth Low Energy means the project can pair with other devices, such as an Android smartphone. The team decided to use the sensors in the Nucleo to detect accidents and potholes in the road and be able to record and report them. Due to the project being a prototype it is large and bulky. This is due to the demonstration versions of the hardware, and the 3D printed parts designed in Autodesk Fusion 360 to protect it. Watch now to find out how Felix overcomes problems with the mBed codebase and how the android app works! What do you think of the project? Or have you entered the design challenge? Let us know on the element14 Community!

Felix works on a new revision to the PCB allowing electronic control of the game using a Teensy and an Arduino. Meanwhile, Ben works on some new mechanisms such as pop bumpers using Autodesk 360, 3D parts, and assembling it together to see how it will work and make adjustments to code using the Arduino IDE. Ben needs to make the ball loader mechanism to cycle through the states of the game. Meanwhile Felix is going to be working on a new revision of the PCB. They’re going to reorient it so that it resembles the way they want it to be in the actual game. They’re going to add some light drivers, some switch drivers, and also work on some code. Felix has a breadboard that he’s worked up and now it’s time to make something that represents how it’s going to actually be in the machine. This includes reorienting the microcontroller to the side to give access to usb, figure out a place to put the screen, and redo some of the components. While Felix goes to work on the board, Ben is going to work on some new mechanisms, and they’ll touch base throughout the process to ensure both the mechanisms and board work together. Felix suggests swapping additional headers so they can swap between a teensy and an Arduino so it can potentially use both. An Arduino isn’t going to give you the same sound capability but it’s going to do the same logic and drive the LCD. It’s a 5 V system but they want to have 12 V going in to control the solenoids. The Teensy and Arduino have their own voltage regulators, but 12 V is too high for them. Ben wires up an LED driver, the TI part current driver, and combined it with the chip registers for the switches. He’s attaching it to the SPI bus of the Arduino so that he can try reading and writing in the same operation to save time. If it works on the Arduino it will certainly work on the Teensy. The Teensy uses 4 bit mode for its SD card but it probably has additional SPI buses that they can access. Once he’s got t

Felix gives an update on the progress of the pinball board. He goes over the headers for the Arduino and headers for the Teensy, the shift registers, the LED Driver, the MOSFETs, the amplifier, the screen, the regulator on/off switch, and the battery. There are also two headers for the inputs and the outputs to drive the lights, as well as, four headers to drive the solenoids. One more thing they will need to add are headers to drive the servos on this board. They will need to make sure that whatever mechanisms Ben comes up with will be supported by the main board. Felix runs various tests on the board and shows you what that looks like on the Arduino IDE. Ben reprinted the disk for the pop bumper. The conductivity the ring isn’t great to begin with but as long as there’s some conductivity the MCU should be able to detect the closed switch. After he’s unable to get a reading it becomes clear he’ll need to rewire and solder the wire to the ring. Ben goes to work putting the pieces together. He points out the mounting points for the pop bumper and the solenoid. While Ben is working on that, Felix fires up a switch example. He’s attached the solenoid and the two contacts to the board. There’s a bearing that appears to be working. It looks like it makes efficient contact and it can trigger the microcontroller to send a signal to actuate the solenoid. Servos are easy to use with the Arduino environment so Ben is using one of them for the ball loading mechanism. He points out the playfield and the positioning of it on the table. He then cuts a test portion of the lower playfield on which to mount the ball loading prototype. Ben puts a switch in place that tells you when the ball is drained. Servos keep pretty good track of their own position but a HOME switch will help dial things in even more. Once Ben figures out where to put the home switch they will be able to wire it up to Felix’s example board. Felix shows a hello world example for the LCD to confirm a

Max steps back from the camera to learn about motors, motor drives, and switches from Felix. Felix takes apart a Motor and they work on a basic H-bridge circuit made from P-channel MOSFETs controlled by NPN Transistors.

The team revisits the Logic Board Game, which they previously scrapped, and an idea Karen suggested about using toggle switches. While Ben did not see much use for toggle switches at the time, he’s sees a way to revive the project by making a Decimal Hex Binary Electronic Quiz game. Separately, Felix has a digital abacus project that he has in mind.

The team is working on a touch control stand for the Super Glue Gun build. To do this they will need to figure out how to mechanically make the stand pop in and out, figure out how to actuate that either with a DC motor or a servo, and then make some code for the microcontroller, if it’s a servo for instance they need to create a timer library with interrupts, and then figure out how to put a capacitive touch sensor on the trigger that can be read by the microcontroller.

Previously, the team added the mechanism for the auto stand using a metal wire stand and a guitar string acting as a cable. The cable is actuated by a servo and utilizes a servo library for the Atmel ATTiny20 Microcontroller they are using. Now they need to find a capacitive touch sensor library, possibly Qtouch from Atmel, to allow the auto stand to retract when your finger touches the trigger.

Ben is happy because he’s standing in front of a table full of oscilloscopes. Felix wants to know what oscilloscopes are and why they’re here. In this episode Ben and Felix evaluate oscilloscopes from Tektronix, Rohde & Schwartz, and Keysight. They discuss the differences between the scopes, what they can do, and put them through the paces.

The team might be onto something here, while the logic gate boardgame had its issues the Hex Game is a lot more fun, and part of the fun is learning to solder! Ben and Felix plan to turn the Hex Game into a kit which could teach how to solder and learn binary or hexadecimal arithmetic. Using Autodesk Eagle, Ben designs a printed circuit board and discusses whether a lipo or AA batteries are better to power it. How can the team keep it simple while keeping it functional?

The team made a PCB breadboard prototype of the Hex Logic game, made a laser paint version of it, refined the design in Eagle, and sent for three boards from OSH Park. Now, Ben will solder up the first one to make sure it works. Afterwards, Felix will coach Karen and Max on how to solder up the other two.

The prototype for the mini pinball machine has a 16x2 LCD display, audio amplifier, 16 switches in, 16 lights out, 4 MOSFET controllers, and 4 servo ports. In today’s episode, Ben translates this prototype into an Eagle design. Ben puts together the PCB for the mini pinball machine in Eagle. He starts with some of the more cumbersome areas first, namely the lights and switches. He’s going to use these molex 2.54 or .1 inch pitch headers. He puts in the 16 switch molex connectors in and 16 for the lights. He’s got to think about how to orient the circuits in relation to the 16 switch molex connectors. He creates spacing so that they are able to make an adapter board that can attach for testing. He won’t run the traces until he has the main components on the board. There should be enough space between these. He lays out placement for the power, the microcontroller, the screen, and input/output plugs on the lower-left. He shows the schematic of the constant current LED driver. Ben reuses a layout of an eagle file for the schematic of the constant current LED driver. They used the TLC59282 constant-current sink driver in the persistence of vision episode and Super Space Shuttle. You source the LED with current and then it sinks into the device. Ben uses a schematic of an LCD display that fits his requirements but lacks an Eagle file so he’ll have to do his own. When working with schematic design software it is often necessary to either hunt down a library or make one. For rare parts it can be quicker to make one. For the schematic, the symbol is representative of the part, whereas the package detail comes from the datasheet. Ben creates a package that matches the physicality of the hardware. After laying out a lot of the parts for the board to run the digital signals Ben needs to attach the SPI signals between the Teensy/Arduino and the I/O chips. At this point he’s added 2 MOSFET packages, headers for the solenoids, voltage regulator, p

Ben tears down an Xbox One X. Marketed as the smallest and most powerful Xbox One, how does it compare in size to an Xbox One S? Ben compares and reveals its CPU/GPU aka APU, heatsink, hard drive, RAM, connectors, and power supply. Max obtained an Xbox One X on launch date and now Ben is going to take it apart. The Xbox One X boasts a much larger GPU, which allows you to do 4K gaming. Microsoft has marketed it as the smallest and most powerful Xbox ever built. It can do 5 teraflops whereas the old one could only do 4 teraflops. Flops are floating-point operations per second. These days the GPUs are much more powerful than the CPU. Both the Xbox and PS4 have combined CPU/GPUs from AMD, called APUs (accelerated processing unit). Ben is not a fan of the latest Xbox controller because it’s a lot more difficult to mod. It has Bluetooth so it does allow you to use it as a wireless controller. The main system weighs approximately 10 pounds so it’s pretty heavy compared to previous iterations. To test Microsoft’s claim that the Xbox one is the smallest and more powerful iteration of Xbox One, Ben puts it up against the shell casing of the Xbox Slim. The Xbox One X is about 5 millimeters wider than the Xbox One Slim. Using a caliper to measure he discovers that the Xbox Box One X is 3.8 inches deeper and .14 inches wider than the Xbox One Slim. The Xbox One X is slightly shorter, 2.5 inches against 2.36 inches so that is the basis for Microsoft calling it the smallest Xbox One. While that is debatable, what is not is the fact that it is definitely the heaviest Xbox One. The Xbox One was originally suppose to be a cable box so it had HDMI In and Out which got quietly dropped. The Xbox One X brought the HDMI In and Out back. Ben removes the Hex screws from the Xbox One case. It comes apart easily after removing two screws. The CPU appears to be mounted upside down. Outside of that, it’s fairly standard Xbox construction. The wireless module is outsi

Ben and Karen are focused on the upper half of the playfield for their mini pinball kit while Felix is all about the sound. Ben and Karen go back to the drawing board to figure out a way they can incorporate walls and barriers in whatever configuration they want. Meanwhile Felix replaces the mechanical rotary potentiometer with something digital. Felix will work in the background to figure out a way for them to do straight amplification without dealing with hissing sounds at the lowest volume. He’ll run some tests to see if they can just run the amplifier at full power and then change the volume based off the DAC. A lot of amplifiers will amplify volume by adding a certain amount of gamin meaning that if you were to have a volume control you would have to do it with a mechanical rotary potentiometer, a digital potentiometer, or adjust the volume of the signal you send to it. His concern is that if they send a bland signal from the DAC would they be subjected to hissing sounds. Eliminating the volume knob will make the unit cheaper to mass produce. Ben and Karen are going to replace the foam mockup of their mini pinball machine with something they can actually play. They’re also going to take a look at whether they can make a shorter lane. They’re trying to figure out what will and won’t fit on the playfield. They aren’t able to make the drain mechanism bigger and have to keep it the same distance from the ball loader, shifting it off center. Ben and Karen go to the drawing board to reconsider their pinball design. Karen’s idea is to litter the playing field with hinges so that you can move the walls and barriers wherever you like. Adding tabs and hinges works for the design of the playfield but before Ben fully incorporating them into the design, Ben is going to check to make sure that the basic stuff works with the new design. He’ll work on the lower level stuff first and build up so they can make a shooting prototype using the tabs. T

The oldest video game record left standing is for the Atari 2600 game Dragster, the first third party game ever and first title released by Activision. A modern speedster, whose done tests with emulation and spreadsheets, claims the recorded score of 5.51 seconds is not possible, the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. Ben does not care about records, he’s using it an excuse to build a RAM analyzer to make decisions on how best to play the game.

Previously, the team worked on all the individual parts and mechanisms within the super glue gun including the trigger, the circuitry, the hot end, the auto stand, and the extruder motor. Now it’s time to bring things together to make a cohesive prototype. They’ll also work on case design and how it works with the autostand. Ben’s been drawing sketches for the case design to figure out placement of the innards. The bottom half will contain the electronics and the top half will bolt onto that and contain the motor, the hot end, and the auto retracting servo. He does a quick mockup with clay to get an idea of the concept in hand. This will help him visualize how the stand will fit in with the enclosure. Ben and Karen have a brainstorming session so they can take an in-depth look at the stand. They received some feedback in a previous episode about how the stand could get in the way, become a false trigger, and other problems. For the stand to work it would have to be used to place the glue gun on a flat surface. For that to happen they need a workable extension retraction but because it would extend past the gun barrel there is some concern that it will get gummed up. To address these concerns, Ben returns to his sketchpad to try and come up with a new design. Next, Ben begins working on a new 3D model in Autodesk Fusion 360. Karen and Ben both agree that it would be beneficial if the gun was longer. This also means that he’ll also need to make some adjustments to the code to accommodate the temperature difference in the hot end. While their original goal was to come up with a mechanism to operate their auto stand, in doing so they come to the realization that they’ll need to redesign almost the entire top portion of the gun, rotating the motor 90 degrees, and adjusting the positioning (possibly swapping out for a bigger one) of the heating elements.

In a previous episode, Ben and Karen worked on the auto stand mechanism only to discover they would need to redesign the entire upper portion of the gun. In this episode, they take apart some Glue Guns to come with some ideas and Ben works on the redesign in Autodesk Fusion 360.

Felix just happens to find an SNES classic mini so Ben suggests they tear it apart. They’ll take it apart, see what’s inside, talk about what they find, and compare it to the NES mini from last year.

Ben is joined by Todd Rogers, owner of the longest held video game world record, whose legacy has been put into jeopardy by statistical models that show that the best possible score is 5.57, not the 5.51 that Todd recorded.

Ben shows you a better way to retro game without miniaturizing an SNES mini. He’ll show you how to attach an LCD screen directly to your Raspberry Pi using the I/O. No HDMI required. Ben’s got a 480x272 TFT-LCD screen, pretty much the same screen that was in the original PlayStation Portable. He’s going to wire it up into 16-bit color which would be 5 bits of red, 6 bits of green, and 5 bits of blue. Ben insulates the screen with a piece of plastic. He bends the ribbon cable back so that he can attach the breakout board into position. He can then see how to fit on the Raspberry Pi A module. Felix is desoldering some parts and should have that for Ben very soon. The plan is to manually wire from the Raspberry Pi over to the module. The 50 pin TFT breakout that he’s using is from Adafruit. It gives you a bunch of solder points so you can attach things to a TFT screen. There is also a voltage booster on this board. It’s for the LED backlight. The LED backlight on this runs at 21 volts and they’re going to power this off 5. They will need a booster circuit to take the 5 volts this runs at and bump it up to a higher voltage that’s just 21. There’s a chip and a coil that will give them their higher voltage. Ben pulls out the header and inserts the flat flex ribbon cable into it. Once he knows it’s in place he can lay it down and that tells him optimum position to place this board. Ben puts the LCD breakout board in place and puts the depopulated Raspberry Pi board in place. Felix removed the GPIO header, camera port, DSI port, HDMI, USB, and AV jack from the Pi. Ben takes a look at a super useful document he found at https://elinux.org/RPi_BCM2835_GPIOs. It’s a list of all the modes the Raspberry Pi GPIO can go into. The thing to look at here is the alt versions. If you go to https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/dpi/README.md you can find a depiction of how the GPIO can be mapped to an RGB color space o

Felix populates the board and makes bodges for the mistakes. Meanwhile Ben makes a laser paint of a new circuit for the inserts and the IR emitter detector. The PCB does two different things, it can either see the ball or can light something up.

In this episode, Ben designs and cuts the plywood enclosure for the mini pinball machine. It’s all tabbed together with screws and nuts. The playfield opens up to access the board. The bottom of the unit is also opened up for easy access to IO from the bottom of the unit. A few months ago they built the flipper ball loading mechanism along with some buttons. Ben’s torn it up because he wants to see how it interfaces with a paper pattern, representing the shape of the new machine, that's been cut to full size. In this case, it's faster to do something with foam core and physically put it together than it is to draw everything on the computer and figure out if things are intersecting. It’s also cheap and quick to mock-up the design with foam core. After fitting it together, they can figure out placement of the flipper buttons. Once he knows it works with the form core he’ll move onto the more expensive six millimeter plywood. Ben gets to work designing in illustrator and continues assembling the pinball kit using the foam core. He’ll also design a board mount. They want to line up their board so that the display is centered. He does a few more tests with the foam core before cutting the more expensive wood. As the cabinet takes shape, an interference between the wood joints and ports on the board emerges that would cause the structure being unstable. Ben goes over some options with Felix. Another consideration for placement of the board is how difficult it would be to access all the plugs for input and output. There at the point where its time to redesign the circuit board, print it out, draw that into their design, and then finalize or prototype the rear panel and both of the bezels. Modifying the PCB hasn’t been too complicated so far. Ben goes over all the changes that were made to the circuit board. He moved the LCD half an inch up, left the Arduino where it was, he moved the Teensy about .7 inches to the right, then he moved the pow

Bob Baddeley, a local entrepreneur and engineer, stops by the shop to show Ben how the team can use their Alexa device to automate their workbench. After walking Ben through the initial setup for building a skill, they’ll use a Python script to command a UART device from a Raspberry Pi down to a USB port in a pinball.

Bob Baddeley returns to continue helping Ben automate his workbench using Alexa and a Raspberry Pi. They’ve already gotten Alexa up and running, talking to a microcontroller over USB. It’s now time to automate everything else in the shop. They’ll use a multimeter and get a reading from it, they’ll go over the network connection to the oscilloscope so that they can change its settings and take screenshots with voice commands. They will interface a Gert Board with the GPIO on the Pi so they can turn bits on and off.