ole has taken my KVM port to Nintendo DS and added some updates. I haven’t played with it much, but he lists the changes as follows.

R3: New features added by Ole:

• fixed the CLDC implementation (timer, memory size, system properties)
• added support for reading of the PNG images (code taken from the PhoneMe project)
• implemented native functions for rendering the basic graphics primitives on the screen
  (lines, rectangles, triangles, images)
• added support for accepting the JAD files in the application browser
• added the core part of the Pstros MIDP library
• added VideoTest example to show how to draw on the screen
• added ‘_rebuild.bat’ to show how to build and preverify the class files.
  Note WTK installation is required.

This is quite interesting if it is able to run some MIDP-compliant games, but we’ll need to do some testing to see how the speed compares to your average mobile phone.

UPDATE: He’s made a few more updates since I originally made this post. Be sure to check out ole’s site for the latest info and download links.

Just a tiny update to my homebrew mandelbrot browser for Nintendo DS. This version merely adds DLDI-support, meaning you should be able to save screenshots as .PNG from pretty much any flashcart. Check the previous post for screenshots, more info, etc. To the right is an actual image saved from the program.

Download r06 .nds

I’ve finished assembling my little gadget…and it works! As a side note, Flux is super handy, it made soldering the tiny SMT stuff really easy, also I learned a few tips from this video.

I ran into one small problem: on the board, I added a JTAG port for in-circuit programming & debugging. However, my cheapo JTAGICE mkI (not mkII) doesn’t support the newer AVR chip I put on the board. So I had to hack in an ICSP port, hence the four ugly green wires coming out of the middle of the board. But once I got that in, I updated the program I had running on the prototype. There were just some minor changes, IO pins were mapped differently, and the syntax for using Timers was slightly changed.

Now that the hardware is essentially done, I need to write some more software, get a few polished minigames on there.

UPDATE: Please enter your email address, I’m trying to find out if there’s any interest in these devices. If enough people subscribe, it will encourage me to do something about it

You can download a short video, or watch it online here:

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Over the christmas holiday I received my PCBs back from Olimex. They look very professionally made, it’s pretty neat knowing that I designed it completely myself. In the picture to the right you can see the board with a few of the components. I haven’t started soldering yet, but I’ve placed them on there so you can get an idea of how it will look when finished.

I’m waiting on the parts from Allegro before I can finish, I’ve requested samples of their surface mount pieces (previously I only got the ones in the DIP packages).

So I built a pretty good prototype of my LED matrix, AVR-based toy (as you can see in my previous post, as well as this video). Now I’ve decided to get a PCB made, using mostly surface mount components, which will make it nice and compact. You can see to the right a 3D render of approximately what it will look like, right now a company in Bulgaria is fabricating my PCB, hopefully I’ll get it within another week or two.

Whether or not it actually will work once I get it & assemble it, remains to be seen.

I used cadsoft’s Eagle tool to design the PCB, and I used this plugin along with povray in order to create the 3d render. Also I sort of edited in the image of the LED matrix…since they didn’t already have a 3d part built for it. But it looks reasonable enough I think.