Mods by Werd

2009-09-02T18:11:00.002-04:00

Wow its been a long time since I have posted anything up here. I have been busy at college and just got home a little over a month ago for a while and I have been itching to do a mod so here we are.

A few weeks ago I Soft Modded a friends Xbox for him and installed a 250GB hard drive and put on XBMC for him and in return he gave me his older Xbox which was a failed attempt to Hard Mod an Xbox. So I took it and a week later this is what I had.

It has an Xecuter 3 Mod chip in it. I flashed the Mod Chips Bios with Xecuter X3 and the back up Bios (pressing both eject and power at the same time) is FlashBios which gives you the ability to reflash your bios if you screw it up.

The Xbox Hard Drive has been upgraded to a 120GB hard Drive and is running XBMC. A great feature is that if you hold the power button the Xbox will boot up on the original Bios with the Mod Chip off and it will boot to the original Xbox Dash allowing you to play Xbox Live.

The case underwent weight loss and with the removal of the DVD Drive is an Xbox Slim. Gap where the DVD Drive would have been has been removed and now is approx. 1/2" thinner than the original case. The DVD drive can still be plugged in to rip your media to the Xbox as well as when you want to play Xbox Live enabled games because on the original Bios the Xbox won't boot up properly without it connected.

I have also added windows all around the Case. The other pictures show alternate views of what the windows look like from different angles but here you can see the Hard Drive as well as the IDE plug for the HD as well as the DVD Drive. The mod chip is sitting underneath the HD. As seen in the other pictures the XBOX jewel on the top of the case has been cleared as well allowing one to see into the Xbox.

The decals and the Mod Chip were both installed prior to my obtaining of the Xbox.

Back up and Running!

2009-04-01T21:58:00.002-04:00

Well i got all of the pictures back up! Hopefully this time everything works out and there won't be anymore blank pictures. Anyways I got more pictures to put up so here they are. It's the Dream Tablet running Power Stone.

From Dreamcast Laptop

Fixing Pictures

2009-04-01T18:14:00.001-04:00

Hey sorry everyone for the down pictures! Seems as if I have more viewers of my blog than I thought. My whole bandwidth was used in a day... So I am changing Image hosting websites and doing some things to help keep the bandwidth usage down. The pictures should be up soon!

DONE!

2009-03-29T22:46:00.005-04:00

Got the Tablet done and I decided to name it the Dream Tablet. It is powered by a 14.8v 6600 mah battery which is nice and big and should get a pretty decent play time off of it. Also you can play and charge at the same time so it makes things nice. Here are the final pictures.

From Dreamcast Laptop

Inside

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Drive

From Dreamcast Laptop

Circuit that controls GD-Drive

From Dreamcast Laptop

Audio amplifier

From Dreamcast Laptop

Screen controller board with Sega Dreamcast underneath it

From Dreamcast Laptop

Pico Psu

From Dreamcast Laptop

Battery

From Dreamcast Laptop

Next to an Xbox 360 for comparison.

Case

2009-03-21T18:55:00.005-04:00

I had a few ideas on how I wanted to make the case. Originally I wanted to vacuum form it and make a wood mold with rounded edges to make it look nice. But I didn't do that. I went to home depot again and bought a sheet of acrylic. This method worked well for me. I got some more of the Insta-set but this time I got Maxi-cure. It had a slightly longer cure time then the stuff I used on my portable and it was a little cheaper. But I must say that I do not like it as much as the stuff I used on my portable.

The dimensions for my case are 13.5" x 11" x 2". Not bad I thought for having the GD drive and the screen resting on top of that! I cut out the pieces with a 10 inch table saw this time with a 200 tooth blade. It worked very well and I got very straight clean cuts.

From Dreamcast Laptop

I glued all the pieces together and got the bottom part of the case assembled. To make sure that my pieces were perpendicular to each other I took a piece of wood and used it to hold my pieces against.

From Dreamcast Laptop

After the case was assembled it was time to make the holes all of the ports, GD drive and the volume knob. I used my dremel with a cutting disc to cut out the GD drive hole and then used a file to make sure I had nice straight lines.

From Dreamcast Laptop

The power switch, and AV/monitor switch I used my dremel and then used a small file to ensure straightness. For the volume I used the hole saw again. The rest of the ports I used a drill. As well as for the speaker holes and I used perf board as a templet as many others do.

After everything was set i began to paint. It is now black instead of clear.

From Dreamcast Laptop

Screen

2009-03-21T18:14:00.005-04:00

So rather than going with the LED mod as I don't think it would saved me much power I decided to stick with the original back light in the screen. I used the Dell E153FP 15" LCD monitor. I opened it up and removed the original power/inverter board (they were all on one) and got the Controller board running on the Pico PSU. Here are two pictures of the controller board, the top and the bottom where power must be connected.

From Dreamcast Laptop

In order to get the controller board working you must connect 3.3 volts to the two pins that the red wire is connected to in the picture. And then ground is the black wire. The other pins I believe are for sending information back to the inverter and such.

The inverter that I am using is one taken from a ccfl light kit for PC lighting. It runs on 12volts and produces enough light with the original ccfl tubes to make for a very bright screen.

For the top part of the case I decided to use the front of the case from the monitor since the cut out for the screen was already exactly the right size. I just had to cut off some tabs on it to get it to fit onto my case. I didn't like the finish on it though because after I painted it, since the finish was different then the acrylic I was using I would most likely end up with two different results. So I put a wire brush attachment onto my dremel and commenced to remove the finish. I then used a sponge sander, used for drywalling, to bring it to a smooth finish. Painting turned out well. I also painted the buttons for use with it. They are a little off white as to contrast against the black case. They turned out well. Here are some pictures of the result with the case glued to the screen.

From Dreamcast Laptop

To mount the screen to the rest of the cast I glued 8 90 degree metal braces to the back of the screen. I glued a nut to the inside of the brace so that the front can be screwed onto the rest of the case from the sides. I also did this to make the screen removable for debugging after everything was assembled.

From Dreamcast Laptop

There are 8 metal braces in total.

Sound

2009-03-21T17:49:00.005-04:00

For sound I used a kit that was suggested to another member of the Benheck forum community. I figured that it would suit my needs and so I went ahead and got it. It is a stereo 1W amplifying circuit. I put it together and everything works great. I'm using 2 4ohm speakers from a Dell sound bar. I'm pretty sure that thing was never meant to be opened. It had 6 or 7 screws in it but even after removing them all, examining it for several hours, and prying on cracks I couldn't get it open. I finally took out my dremel with a cutting disc and started cutting it up. The amplifying IC can run off a wide range of voltage so I decided that since I was using 2 4 ohm speakers rather than the recommended 8 ohm that i would use 5 volts. It works great.

Here are some pictures of the set up with the head pone jack attached as well. When head phones are plugged in sound through the speakers is turned off. The headphone jack works great.

From Dreamcast Laptop

I didn't want to just use the metal post from the potentiometer for volume control cause it wouldn't match the style of the tablet. I also didn't want to salvage a knob from something else because they didn't match what I wanted either. I wanted something that had a larger diameter and wasn't very thick. The only possession of mine that I could find that had a knob I could use was in active use. So I settled on making my own knob. I used a hole saw and cut out 3 pieces of acrylic that were the same size, and then one more of the next size up so that it would have a backing. I glued them all together, put a notch in it with my dremel and painted it. It turned out really well. Here are the final results.

From Dreamcast Laptop

(ignore the dust on it, it was stuff that settled on it after painting was complete)

GD-Drive slimming

2009-03-21T17:11:00.006-04:00

After I got the GD-Rom onto the tray I decided that it was too tall for my liking. I cut out more from the tray and flattened the remaining plastic on the GD-Rom. I did ave a little bit of a problem because now that the GD-Rom sat so low it would hit across the bottom of the tray. Just flattened the bottom out a little bit and all was well. Here are my results.

From Dreamcast Laptop

(GD-Rom disc does no come above sides of the tray)

As you can see in the pictures I put all of the components for the circuit onto a perf board.

GD Drive

2009-02-04T23:09:00.005-05:00

Ok so after I got the CD-Drive working I needed a way to mount the GD-Rom onto the CD-Drive tray. At first my thought was to mount it underneath which would keep the thickness down. Unfortunately as I was thinking about this I decided that this was probably not the best idea because the method in mounting it to the CD tray was using glue. So If someone was a little frustrated they could push too hard and could possibly push the drive off the tray. It would also cause me to have to remove one of the major support beams that connect both sides of the drive mechanism. If I went this method I would have to cut that off and then reinforce it in another way.

So then I thought about placing it on top of the tray. Obviously it wouldn't fit but that is where my good friend the Dremel comes in. I put a disc on my GD-Rom and made a rough trace of it and put it on top of the tray and commenced to dremel. Here was my final product.

From Dreamcast Laptop

CD-Tray cut out.

From Dreamcast Laptop

With the GD-Rom on it.

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom and CD

I decided to go this route because it would be less of a hassle. More structurally sound, and it didn't add very much height to the system.

GD Drive schematic

2009-02-04T22:46:00.007-05:00

Ok so I got the CD-Drive working. For a while now I have been trying to figure out how I was going to get it working and had a few ideas and built a couple prototypes and have finally settled on one that works completely. It uses two 555 timers and 4 sensors, and one button to open and close the drive.

From Dreamcast Laptop

Here is the schematic.

So basically how it works is you have one of the 555's to control when the tray goes out and the other for when it goes in. The 555 that makes it go out, you put the switch/sensor connected to pin 2 of that 555 on the closed side of the tray so that when it is closed it pushes the switch. Put the switch that is connected to pin 4 on the open side so that when it is open it pushes the button/switches the switch.

Then for the 555 that closes it do the opposite. Put the switch connected to pin 2 on the open side and the switch connected to pin 4 on the closed side. Basically what happens is when it is closed you push S1 and that triggers the open 555. When it is open it pushes pin 4 of the opening 555 and resets it sending it back to 0v. It pushes the button connected to pin 2 for the closing 555 so when you push S1 it triggers the closing 555. When it is completely closed it pushes the switch connected to pin 4 of the closing 555 and it sends it back to 0v.

One of the problems I had with this at first was I didn't have the capacitors on it at first and for some reason the circuit would work until I hooked the motor up to it and I'm thinking that the motors induced voltage after it got shut off would cause the 555 that performed the direction opposite to the way it was going (so when it got completely opened it would instantly trigger the closing 555 and begin to close). This would go on endlessly until you took away the power. So I was trying to think of a new way to do it and then I thought about putting in the two capacitors and it worked. Later on I had to switch out the capacitors for some larger 3300uf ones instead because 1000uf didn't seem to be enough. Hooked it up to 12v and all worked.

Video of it working.

50 Pin relocation

2009-01-31T18:09:00.008-05:00

So an update on my tablet. As I said in my previous post I got the 50 pin relocation of the GD-Rom controller board working so I wanted to share my experiences with it.

So to start off I first needed to remove the original connectors. I have read how some have done it with a heat gun and melted the solder and then pulled the connectors off. I could not go this route because I don't have a heat gun. So I tried a slightly different method. On the Motherboard side you can see the pins come up off the board from the traces so I took a razor blade and just sat there cutting along the pins until they were cut through. Then I heated up each side of the connector with my soldering iron and lifted that side up. It came right off. Be careful when cutting through the pins though. Its best to apply moderate pressure and just do a lot of runs along it rather than trying to muscle through each one at a time. I did moderate pressure the first time and it came off in a breeze. Then I was dumb and accidentally broke one of the caps off doing something else and since I don't have a spare cap lying around I just got my other Dreamcast and cut off the connector again. Only problem was I was kind of mad about it so I tried to muscle my way through it and I ended up pulling up 3 traces. Good thing I had found the pin-out of the traces so I could solder on one of the points and all was good.

From Dreamcast Laptop

So since I cut it off I just had to take off the remaining end of the pins that was left over in the traces. I found the easiest way to do this was to heat up the trace and then drag to the side. The remainder of the pin should come up with your soldering iron, then wipe it off on a wet paper towel. I would not suggest using your sponge or whatever you use to tin your soldering Iron because then you get these REALLY annoying tiny pieces of metal that are a pain to get out because thy stick into it.

When preparing to solder onto the wires I highly suggest tinning the ends of the wire before trying to solder it to the trace. Connection goes much faster and less painless. Plus in the end you will get a stronger bond which is always good. I really thought that soldering the wires on would take a while but it took about 5 minutes to do 25 wires since I had already previously cut, stripped, and tinned all the wires.

From Dreamcast Laptop

So after finishing that I needed to figure out how to connect them to the GD-Rom controller. Only problem is that you can't see the the pins on this side so trying to cut the pins won't work. So this is the point when I decided to try and connecting the wires to the points that I had found that I described in my previous post. Well this failed because I ended up soldering wires to the wrong spot multiple times and in the end it didn't work. The LED on the controller turned on but that was it. No video or audio and obviously the GD-Rom didn't spin up. So I decided to try again but I did it a different way by trimming down the plastic on the connector and bending the pins out and soldering to the pins there. Got that all wired up and tried it out and the LED would blink and shut off. So as a last chance effort I'm going to try and Dremel off the connector and then doing direct trace to trace.

This proved to do the trick as I got the 50 pin relocation done and my Dreamcast is working. I ended up taking my dremel with a cutting disc to the connector on the GD-Rom board and just slowly cut a little bit off at a time until I got down to the traces. Then I just took my razor blade and pulled the remaining little pieces of plastic off. Then took the soldering Iron and removed all the remaining pins. I actually managed to only tear up one trace on this side but I just took a look at my pin-out and all was well.

In total I had 3 torn up traces on the Mobo and 1 on the GD-Rom board and with my pin-outs I got the Dreamcast to work.

Got some pics.

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom "Pin-outs"

2009-01-31T12:16:00.013-05:00

*Disclaimer! I am not responsible for anything you do which may*
*result in injury or dea...d electronics. (you thought I*
*was going to say death didn't you?)*
*Perform these actions at your own risk!*

Well the title may be a little misleading but that's what I have essentially done. On both the GD-Rom controller board and the Mobo there is a point on the board that corresponds to each trace under the the connector for the GD-Rom. I know that some people have given up work on their Dreamcast portables because they have torn up a trace on the board. Well now hopefully those people can continue their projects again. I took a couple high-res scans of both areas on the boards where the pins are located. On the GD-Rom controller board they are on the same side as the connector and most points are near the connector and on the Mobo all the points are on the opposite side of the board directly under the connector.

I am 95% sure that the pin-out for the Mobo is correct as I tested each one with my multi-meter since I couldn't just follow the traces. The one on the GD-Rom connector should all be correct although I didn't use my multi-meter on every connection, just every 5 or so to make sure that I was still on track. But before you use any of this I would suggest that you test the trace and the point to make sure that you are doing the right one.

I want to add in though that I have done the 50 pin relocation using this information because I had 4 traces that were torn up and my dreamcast IS working. But regardless please keep in mind that this information is UNCOMFIRMED! I'm putting it up here so that others can have a bench mark and a starting place and something to compare their results to if they wish to help try and confirm my results.

Click on these two pictures to download the High Res. scans.

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom controller board side: 2708 x 2380, 4.38MB

From Dreamcast Laptop

Mobo side: 2576 x 1828, 2.88MB

So now onto the pin-outs. I would highly suggest that if you use these MAKE SURE TO TEST YOUR CONNECTION FIRST! Make sure that it is correct before you connect anything! I also would suggest to not try and do the relocation of the GD-Rom controller board using only these points! It would be very easy to mix up a point or accidentally solder your wire to the wrong point in which case you finish, plug it in and it doesn't work or worse you could fry your Dreamcast. Anyways here are the pin-outs.

From Dreamcast Laptop

Well those were my findings. Once again I want to say that this information is unconfirmed as I am the only one who has tested it. Hopefully another person or possibly even two people can try it out and then we can work together to try and get the confirmed results out.

Newest Project

2009-01-30T21:45:00.014-05:00

Well I have started work on my next big project. I'm going to make a Sega Dreamcast Tablet. LED modded 15" screen, tray type disc drive, docking station, and some other things. I have already started work on this but the first thing that I did was to take pictures and then make 3d models in Google Sketch-up so that I could actually manipulate all the components to where I want them while coming up with a design. I got pictures of all the internals except for the mother board because the mother board was pretty easy to find in a google search but the other boards were a bit harder and you couldn't find a picture of just the specific board.

Click on any picture to have an enlarged picture.

First off is the Controller board:

From Dreamcast Laptop

56k Modem Top

From Dreamcast Laptop

56k Modem Bottom

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom controller board

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom top

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom bottom

From Dreamcast Laptop

Now onto the Sketch-Up models. They definitely aren't life like or anything, they were just all made quickly but are still almost exact. I estimated the height of all the caps and IC's but other than that the sizes should be accurate and the way I made all of the ICs and caps is by overlaying a picture onto the board in sketch-up and drew the caps and ICs on top of the board according to the pictures so they all should be pretty accurate. Also the motherboard is the most well known revision with the GD-Rom controller board if that wasn't obvious. Also I did not make a sketch-up model of the 56k modem.

Just a quick note about these files and where they are uploaded to. They are uploaded to a google site. Since I don't have my own server space or anything I had to use this free service to host my models for you guys to download. When you click the link it should bring up the download right away. I'm not sure if there is a bandwidth limit ut I'm sure there is or there is some kind of limitation to using this so if it doesn't work I'm sorry and try again a different day or something.

Controller Board

GD-Rom controller board

GD-Rom

Motherboard

If any of the links don't work try heading over to the site where the files are hosted to download the files. And if that doesn't work, sorry try again a different day.

Sega Dreamcast Portable

2009-01-30T20:05:00.007-05:00

Well I did not really keep very good tabs on my first portable project so I don't really know how much i can say about it at this point. I will go over it real quick just so that people can know a little bit more than what I have previously posted. I don't really have many WIP pictures either but I will post what I can. And I would like to thank Family Guy on Benheck for his help and answering some questions I had.

When I first started this project I ordered a Dreamcast from ebay and I was looking for a cheap one (duh) and I found one that was broken, it was a typical controller board fuse problem so I snatched up that dreamcast and got it not too long later. I opened it up to replace the resistor which I had done a few times before and to my disbelief I found that I had gotten the second revision of the board. One without the GD-Rom controller board. At the time I didn't even know that there was one that came without the GD-Rom board but did a little research, and again thanks to Family Guy I learned up on these. Turns out that some people couldn't get homebrew or any boot up discs to work but Family Guy said that he knew a way so if you have one of these Dreamcasts and want to know how maybe get in contact with him.

Anyways here are a couple pics of the Dreamcast.


From 060826233152

From 060826233152

So after I got the board I ordered a Pico PSU as the means of powering everything in my portable. The one I got was the PicoPSU 120W I think that this was a bit overkill though as on the bottom of the Dreamcast it says that its power consumption is only 27 watts but any ways that power supply definitely works and it's very small and was way easy to fit into the case.

From 060826233152

So then came the screen. I used the standard 5" PSone screen. Actually I used the Zenith Xbox Screen but its the same internals. Except for one thing. The zenith screen actually comes with a voltage regulation board.

From 060826233152

I have heard that using this board you can use a 12v power supply but I tried hooking the screen up to the 12v line on the Pico Psu through the regulator board and I got interesting results but it never ended up with me being able to use 12v. I think that some people have used it though but I can't remember the parameters around its use for them.

So then I hooked everything up to make sure that everything was working and sure enough I had no problems.

From 060826233152

But after everything was working I set that all aside to start work on my case. I don't have many pictures of this part but how I made the case was I went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of acrylic. Took it home, traced out the pieces that I was going to need for the case on the protective sheet over the acrylic and then used a band saw to cut out the pieces. Many have mistaken my case for being CNC machined so I will take that as a compliment to how I did cutting out the pieces.

After this I traced on the front piece the viewing size of the screen. I drilled a hole in the middle of the area that needed cut out and then cut out the screen with a scroll saw. I took the blade off and then put it through the hole I had drilled and cut the screen out.

After I got all the pieces cut out for the case I put them together. I had originally planned on using epoxy to glue the pieces together and I bought some but was unhappy with the results. ie: yellow cured color, sloppy, mixing the two tubes. So I went a different route and went to the local hobby shop and picked myself up some InstaCure+ as well as some Insta-set. I liked the results much more and it was a more instantaneous setting so that I wouldn't have to wait overnight to continue work on my case. It also produced an extremely strong bond!

So got the case all made and then I needed to start putting the components into the case. I mounted pretty much everything using screws and made my own mounts for all the stuff. To make the mounts I made small squares (.25"x.25" approx.) and stacked them on top of each other until I got the desired height for the part I was mounting. Then I glued them together with the glue and accelerator, drilled a small whole (size depended on the screw), and then I would screw them onto the part I was mounting, throw some glue on the mounts, and placed it in my case so that I wouldn't have to worry about not lining one up properly.

From 060826233152

So that was pretty much it. I got everything mounted and and put together, took it apart again, painted, put everything back in, put on the hinges, and it was done! So here are the results.

From 060826233152