Breadboard testing

The circuit for the SNES is identical to the NES one. Breadboarding was a cinch, as I was already familiar with everything. The only difference is the PIC program.

Soldering everything together

I ran out of thin red wire putting everything together, which is why you can see a big green thick wire on the left there! Luckily I had enough thin red wire for all the delicate work.

Fitting everything in place

The SNES controller has a lot more space inside it than the NES one, but putting it back together once you’re ready to close up is a complete bugger! The shoulder switches have loose little circuit boards, which you can see at the top of the pic in brown. They’re quite fiddly to get in place, as well as the plastic switches which cover them. It took quite a few trys to get it closed up; helped with a good prod from a small screwdriver through the edges to get everything in place! I put a recharging socket on the top of the controller, so hopefully (fingers crossed) I won’t have to open it again!

Finished and working, next to it’s little brother

Ta-Dar! Isn’t it pretty! The D-Pad on the SNES controller has quite a nicer feel to it than the NES original. It just fits perfectly in the hand saying, play with me! .. I can almost hear the Mario theme tune.. and I’m getting Street Fighter II flashbacks

A few months ago my good friend Robert came to me with Marks URL and demanded that I make him a wireless NES controller for his Wii/MAME Cab, then after a few eyebrow raisings from myself (no not that kind!) he offered to sump up the costs for the hardware and we had ourselves a deal!

The wireless works by using an AM radio transmitter/receiver pair to send the buttons signals. At each end there is PIC16F84A to encode and decode the button signals.. and that’s pretty much it! Simple huh! Woo that was quick, cya!

… Oh ok! ok! Here’s some pretty pictures!

Programming the PIC Chip

Programming the PIC chip. This circuit board hooks up via the serial cable to my computer and I can download programs onto the chip. There’s a very simple test setup on the board to allow me to take inputs from the press switch on the right and control the LEDs.

Receiver Assembly

On the left you can see m soldering together the receiver board. The little clampy things that are holding it for me while I work on it are actually called “Helping hands” On the right I’m making sure it fits in the box! I wanted my receiver to look a little more Wii-like than Marks one, so I used a white box with rounded edges. I’m really happy with the result!

Transmitter Circuit testing

This is the transmitter circuit being Breadboarded. Breadboard is a special electronics testing thing. It lets you plug all your components together to test it, but without making it permanent. Each wire you can see is easily unplugged from the board and swapped to a different socket to allow the electricity to flow to somewhere else. It makes testing stuff super easy!

Transmitter Assembly

Squeezing everything in here was a bitch! But I finally got it all in! The transmitter is powered by an iPod nano battery! It’s small.. but it could be smaller! I’ve flattened out all the pins on the PIC chip so that it’ll fit under the original Nintendo circuit board. On the right pic you can see I’ve got an on/off switch and a little charging socket. The on/off switch toggles the battery between the PIC chip and the charging socket.

Finally all together and working!

The final product! In use (left) and on charge (right).

Now Robert and I can play the original Super Mario on the Wii Virtual Console using the original controller!

Then we moved in and slowly accumulated “stuff”.. “things”.. and “bits’n'bobs”. They piled up.. evolved.. and formed gangs, which attacked us on the way to the fridge. We fought back with charity shop donations and car boot sales, but the onslaught eventually overpowered us.

So, in capitulation to their demands, we thus embark on “Project Shed”. A shiny new home for our devious captors.

Day 1

The old shed. Dirty, leaky, unsafe for human habitation. Project shed stage #1: DESTROY!

My mate Jon the builder, who pretty much did this entire thing while I sat around eating biscuits and taking pictures

Day 2

To maximise the available space, we rebuilt the outer wall to be in line with the garage, giving us an extra foot of space inside. In the pic on the right, you can see all the plumbing coming out of the laundry room. That all had to go! We’re not having a sink in my sexy new room.

Door frame in place, while we wait for the wall to dry.

Day 3

Level up!

Day 4

Render on the outside wall, new roof and insulation inside! Behind the plaster board are wood batons with foil backed insulation material. This place is going to be nice and warm in winter! Outside you can see the edge of a huge pile of crap! That pile extends down the entire length of the garden and when we were finished, took two cars, 4 trips to the dump to get rid of! (Thanks little sis for helping out!)

Day 5

Most of the floor is interlocking wood flooring placed on wood batons for extra insulation, but this space in the top left was too shallow. The dark wet patch is levelling fluid, which you just poor on the floor and it drys completely flat. When the room is finished this totally flat area will be completely level and perfect for my pinball machine! On the right, you can see the laminate flooring being stuck down to give a nice finish.

When I started I said to Rachel that I wanted this to be 100% her space for her to work in. I was a little hesitant when she said she wanted one wall to be red and do a film montage on another, but check it out! Doesn’t it look awesome!

Day 6

Finally finished! Complete with sofa bed!

.. and of course, Pinball!!

I proposed in front of the Atomium in Brussels. I think I picked a pretty romantic spot It was snowing softly and the lighting was very pretty.

Gone are the days of beige! Shiny new Logitech Z-10 speakers arrived today to complete the panoramic beauty of my desktop

They’re gorgeous! and sound awesome too! They’ve even got a little LED panel in on them, so when I’m playing music it shows up the track info on the speaker!! and it’s got play/pause fast-forward/rewind and skip track touch sensitive buttons all on the speakers! Tres coolio! Definitely the pièce de résistance of my 20″ widescreen desktop.

Inside the case the shiny looking goodness continues

For the techies who care, it’s a 2.4Ghz Intel Core2Duo with 4Gig of PC2-8500 DDR2 1066Mhz RAM.

I built my new computer with two things in mind #1 was Photoshop. I wanted my new computer to eat 50meg tiff images for breakfast and #2 was silence. My old computer buzzed and rattled like crazy and it drove me mental. This new computer is totally silent! The motherboard has a heat pipe cooled chipset, the ram is heat piped and the case is a Arctic Cooling T1 Pro Silentium.. See their clever use of word play there It’s an awesome case. Shiny black and all the fans have little rubber shock absorbers, so it’s totally silent I love it!

In my quest for silence, I missed one thing.. the graphics card. The fan on the graphics card that I got was crazy noisy! So I ordered a ZeroTherm GX815 cooler for it. It arrived today. Now what I wasn’t expecting when I turned it on was the fact that it’d look like this:

How cool is that!?! It’s got blue LEDs inside it! Why, I have no idea! I’ve seen some case mods on the net where you can stick a transparent side panel on your computer.. but that seems a bit chavy to me. I must admit, the cooler is a tad on the enormous side! It’s supposed to cool super high end graphics cards, so it does dwarf my little graphics card a bit..But still.. it’s pretty, isn’t it!