I’ve been seeing a lot of PS3s come up on craigslist with broken optical drives, usually around 100$. Figuring this was a great way to free up my quadcore from mundane cross-compiling duty, I set about purchasing one and setting up the Z2 cross compiling environment. It took a bit of doing, but it works. Here’s a step by step guide for setting yours up.
Oh and Java is working now too. Lots of packages compiling now. Don’t try installing GDM, can get you into a nasty crash loop.
So I got fluxbox compiled. This is a real game changer, as it’s fully configurable via a keys file. You can get my current .fluxbox/keys file here. I’ve sent some of the window manager commands like maximize and fullscreen to alt-m alt-c etc. I’ve posted a video of playing scummvm and running other apps simultaneously, below. Exciting times!
As requested here it is, for legal reasons you’ll still need to add your own wireless as described here. For those interested in building it themselves,
So every week or so I go to my junk box and look through the parts I’m not using. I think to myself, “Hunter, do you need this or is it taking up space?”. The answer is always “taking up space”, hence my penchant for soldering (taping, hot gluing, welding) things together. This week, it was a slim ps2. Taking the wallclock (microscope edition) apart, I stripped it of a couple of printed circuits (don’t reeeeaaaly need that last row of keys do we?). A disassembly of a ps2 eyetoy camera revealed a tightly integrated circuit board with a sharp L angle. For those of you who have never played eyetoy, it’s essentially project Natal with a low resolution webcam. Fantastically fun at parties, not particularly lasting for single player. Removing the ps2 slim casing revealed a tightly integrated mobo, not a lot of room to fit things in, but a couple of good screw-points for attaching the new screen. From there things came together reasonably well. The eyetoy camera has 2 extra LED lights and a light sensor module that needed to be front-facing. Using a lighter from a coworker, I heated up a large nail and poked a couple of holes opposite the original videophone bezel. Lucky for me, the eyetoy front and back focal lenses attach seperately and I was able to connect them through the front camera and secure it tightly with some superglue. This also lined the camera circuits up l-bracket style, which made for a handy slip-over for the top casing of the ps2. I attached the rest of the videophone circuits together in a vertical sandwich along the back of the ps2 casing. This worked well for two reasons. First, no capacitors are touching, and second it gave me space to feed the extra cabling through (video and usb). It’s a tight fit, but it helps keep the clutter down.
New Zipit Update! I’ve gotten ScummVM working with the new kernel. Xserver-kdrive too, so our memory usage is down again. You’ll need to edit your .scummvmrc file and add the game entries by hand (I still don’t have the keys as joystick or mouse in), but they play fine. Update your git tree and remove the zipit temp directory, Bitbake intltool, then bitbake xserver-kdrive. Intltool will fail unless you bitbake it directly, and not as a dependency include. Set the graphics scale to 1x and everything is gravy. Screenshots of the Scummvm selector screen and the Monkey Island EGA DRM scheme are below. This is running even better than the dosbox build as there’s not x86 conversion happening!
Every once in a while you come across a busted piece of kit that you know you make useful again. This week, it was an ACN Video Phone. For the unknowing, ACN sells ip phone/video phone service bundled to their video phone hardware. On the upside, the resale value is very low. On the downside, this means it’s worthless without the monthly fees.… Or IS IT??
The short story: The flash worked and I’ve got everything working that worked before. The long story?
After a power out blanked my wallclock’s memory, I was not eager to go searching through ten year old websites looking for a new terminal emulator. Luckily I found a ten year old NES emulator that loads fine! Behold wallclock 2.0, NES edition! Also be sure to peep the ancient medical tablet that is pulling duty as my new serial terminal. Fun!
10 year old HP Jornada Windows CE 3.0 device – 15$ Serial extension cable – 1$ Shell script to display network and system statistics – 0$ Using Linux – Priceless.
