Worklog MRKane's final PS2 portable, first competition entry

[ttsgeb]

Your videos are private, so I'm not convinced that your control board actually works.

 

[PvtDerp]

Having some trouble trying to watch those YouTube videos, says that the videos are set as private
Really eager to see them and the rest of this build

 

[MRKane]

Sorry about that! As it turns out my videos weren't even published! I'm sure after all this waiting and anticipation you'll be disappointed with what's really just a few short videos!

 

[MRKane]

Fun day setting up the screen control!
TLDR: Fluffy isn't in this post

Turns out some of the guides on which direction the SMD caps should go are mildly misleading, and this is important if you've a basic little low-pass smoothing filter for a screen signal. I eventually asked a friend for help and he pointed me at a very old jpg that had all the information I needed.

Spoiler: This was the wrong way

This was also a bit too small given the space, but I made these 1206 to make life easier on myself. This is also the WRONG way around, and the last time I'll see it with neat soldering. NOTE: This might be more for my reference later if I'm unsure of something.

And this is the correct wire placement...so between these two things it became annoying to narrow down just where and how there was an issue. Plus I couldn't do heat gun soldering on the board anymore thanks to having mounted plastic parts close by.
NOTE: I'm putting this here as I'll probably need it for reference later too. Sorry about the shaky cam - I was holding multiple things at this time

Spoiler: And a video of it hard-coded to turn the screen on and off at intervals

 

[MRKane]

I can't seem to add photos to the prior post. I went about trimming today and had a bit of a whoopsie, but it'd seem that it wasn't in an essential place so I don't have to find another PS2...yet

Spoiler: Whoopsie

Also, does anyone know a good way to calm their partners concerns about the smell associated with board cutting? It was contained, and well ventilated, and I had all the correct gear but I still received assorted complaining noises

 

[MRKane]

So it's been a while up my neck of the woods with a few things I didn't consider coming to play. The first is that I sunk a mounting post through the PS2 so will have to run some power lines for the USB port (it's a prototype) and the second is that I forgot that the memory card had a crystal on it so that it had to be relocated.

Spoiler: Memory card and fluffy

Fluffy inspects memory card for fatal flaws and issues. Birds are known for having exceptional vision which makes him perfect for this task! Bit of a shame that I can't speak his language so can only guess at what he's inspecting.

Relocated memory card. Original positioning was underneath the PS2 motherboard, but I left room in this area for just this reason.

So naturally no plan survives the first contact intact and this was where I found out how much of an impact 0.1mm could make on a setup like this. So the brass headerpins I've got for a few of the connections have a diamater of 0.85mm, and the standard header pins I've got are 0.7x0.6mm. Now the ethernet pin holes on the PS2 are 0.8mm diamater, and the AV port is a little below that so I had to try and thread things through to make them work accordingly because naturally my measurements and placements weren't perfect, but I managed and didn't have to break out the 0.6mm copper wire which was my backup plan. Took a very long time...

Spoiler: Pin photos...lets call them "pinups!"

So the header pins had the plastic tabs cut in half and then trimmed to make them fit close together. Fun times with things failing here and pins falling onto the ground. Fluffy actually made off with a brass header pin and we don't know if he ate it so I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

So the bit not pictured was covering all of these with tape so that they couldn't fall through and soldering the underside of the unit. I did get to remove all the black bits. The following was a photo of the test arrangement, but I rather like how good it looks before I mucked up the soldering

So a few hours behind me, a couple of catches up with extended family and yet more messing around and I finally decided to try testing the system to see if it was working as expected.

Spoiler: Spoiler: It was

Enjoy my monkey rigging just to get this test powered up and working. Those long graceful power lines, in vivid red, green, and striking black! Oh, and there's also a working PS2 rig here meaning my rushed, yet grand, plan hasn't fallen to bits just yet despite my mistakes.

Spoiler: Finally a quick video of the present assembly

I've got a lot of tidying up left to do here, but the most critical electrical assembly of the unit is essentially done now.

 

[MRKane]

So I spent about a day poking things with a soldering iron and going through all the tests I had planned during assembly. I started to get suspicious that something was terribly wrong just after lunch time because none of the tests had failed so far (and if you're a programmer you know that nothing is ever that successful!). Turns out the biggest issue I had were a couple of noisy connections and a crappy yPbPr breakout connector (but I already knew about that).

I love that I didn't have to solder a heap of wires, the pins were a task enough, but I was determined to go out of my way to make the wires I did use as colourful as possible hehehehe.

As a question to anyone using a SMB server (say a Raspberry Pi) can freeMcBoot transfer save games to the USB through it? I'm tempted to drop that second USB port on the right as it goes straight to the PS2

So at this stage I'll have to move on to checking that the OrangePi works as intended as I've kind of lost the SD card, so I'd better find that.

Spoiler: Picture of completed first layer assembly

You'll see on the right I decided to drop some holes through for the charing indicator LEDs, and try to scrape off the copper to stop them from shorting. Turns out that JLC makes really good board and it won't simply fall to bits like some of the others. I'll have to carve it out with the dremel to mount these.

So after this I'll need to look at what I'm doing with the screen driver board placement, battery holders, and also the case. She's still far from complete!

UPDATE: Just can't get the OrangePi to talk to the PS2 while mounted to the board. I've a strong suspicion that there's something wrong with the caps I've got so have ordered some new ones. To be fair I rather expected this.

UPDATE 2: Somehow all 3 of my SD cards are corrupt. This makes zero sense, or is incredibly unlucky from a statistical angle. The image was a pain to setup too. At least I know the issue

 

[MRKane]

Need a little help here. While I'm waiting to crash out of the competition for things to arrive, I decided to do a few more tests and start linking a couple of other things up. I've discovered that it can't see any attached USB device

So wiring a USB is pretty straightforward but testing the voltage showed I was getting some significant drops (down to 4.8v) and that the regulator was possibly giving out - doesn't worry, I've got spares, but the main question is: Before I lift the board and put another one in does anyone know if this can be simply solved by getting the mean voltage on the PS2 back up to 5V? I've tried putting a 5v step down just for the USB and that had no change. All lines that I could test on the board seem fine.

Spoiler: Token Fluffy video in his new favourite place

So under the bedsheet is my workbench/table and he's developed a penchant for stealing inedible things from the table. Suffice to say we had a scare not long ago when we thought he'd somehow managed to swallow a brass header pin, and after that everything got covered up!

UPDATE:
After numerous checks I eventually concluded that the USB wasn't, for whatever reason, working. It turns out that things do come apart easier than they go together, or perhaps it was easy because I don't use hippie lead-free solder. I pulled out a spare PS2 I've got and checked it over before starting to strip it down and trim it. I'm not happy with this sort of thing happening but given that I have about a third of the PS2s show up DOA I guess it's to be expected.

Spoiler: Stripping a PS2, a normal day in the household

Fluffy is pretty much always with me, and I'm always making sure he doesn't eat anything he shouldn't. I know if he's up to something because the peeps that he makes changes.

UPDATE 2:
New board, left everything on and tested right up to the last parts were removed, still doesn't work. I'm beginning to suspect that it has to do with the 5v regulator being noisy, or something else in the system. This stuff should be pretty "dumb" at the end of the day and just 4 wires.

UPDATE 3:
After days of troubleshooting and pulling things apart then re-assembling them it turns out that the wire MUST solidly contact the pad and not just the through hole, and this was the cause of my issues here. As a result of this I'll make some changes to the base mounting board so these areas are always accessible least it becomes an issue in the future but for the moment I think it's finally resolved. Not impressed that this took me so long, but it is what it is I guess.

 

[MRKane]

So aside from the small nightmare that I've been having getting that USB port to work, I have been designing the case. By and large the unit so far has been a "minimum approach" but after stumbling across a few items around the office and having a drink with a few mates I think I finally got inspiration in the direction I wanted ("What would it look like on 'Star Trek'?). I've contracted a local firm to cut me out an acrylic faceplate for the unit and am aiming to 3D print the rest of the shell.Essentially I'm aiming for something similar to the other acrylic-fronted portables because life for me involves a lot of dust and I quickly got sick of cleaning down my other unit and not being able to clean parts of it so hopefully this will get around that, plus provide a very solid base for the rest of the case to mount to, and it's bulletproof

This'll be one of the more expensive parts of this build for me, but I feel it'll be well worth it.

Spoiler: Terrible quality render of the front half

Terrible quality because what am I? A graphic artist?! Actually, I am a trained graphic artist so lets ignore that...

It's going to be big.

EDIT: forgot to put the speaker holes in for the render! It's a couple of holes...you're not missing anything.

 

[Dmcke5]

So aside from the small nightmare that I've been having getting that USB port to work, I have been designing the case. By and large the unit so far has been a "minimum approach" but after stumbling across a few items around the office and having a drink with a few mates I think I finally got inspiration in the direction I wanted ("What would it look like on 'Star Trek'?). I've contracted a local firm to cut me out an acrylic faceplate for the unit and am aiming to 3D print the rest of the shell.Essentially I'm aiming for something similar to the other acrylic-fronted portables because life for me involves a lot of dust and I quickly got sick of cleaning down my other unit and not being able to clean parts of it so hopefully this will get around that, plus provide a very solid base for the rest of the case to mount to, and it's bulletproof

This'll be one of the more expensive parts of this build for me, but I feel it'll be well worth it.

Spoiler: Terrible quality render of the front half

Terrible quality because what am I? A graphic artist?! Actually, I am a trained graphic artist so lets ignore that...
View attachment 12629

View attachment 12630

It's going to be big.

EDIT: forgot to put the speaker holes in for the render! It's a couple of holes...you're not missing anything.

Don't worry about the size, I'm loving the 8" screen so far on my build. I'd offer to cut your acrylic for you, but probably find shipping cost would probably make it pointless. Keen to see this one going! A portable Ps2 is definitely something I'm considering in the future, I loved the Ratchet and Clank series as a kid along with a bunch of others too so being able to play them again without being tethered to a tv or PC would be great!

 

[MRKane]

I didn't realise yours was 8" also! Long live the huge builds!

I do have a couple of other screens here but when tinkering and testing I concluded that a screen that large is a true pleasure, plus with a 4:3 ratio I don't have to mod any of the games to get the aspect ratio correct. My logic shifted during the PCB production to the mindset that I was making a real luxury portable...it almost needs a built in cup-holder now come to think of it...

Thanks for the offer to mill the acrylic - had all the parts for my CNC shown up when expected (and been correct) I might have been able to have done mine myself, mais ces't la vie, and I'd say you're right about shipping - especially at the moment where the world really seems to have gone crazy. Loving your build BTW - real inspiration to behold!

 

[Dmcke5]

I didn't realise yours was 8" also! Long live the huge builds!

I do have a couple of other screens here but when tinkering and testing I concluded that a screen that large is a true pleasure, plus with a 4:3 ratio I don't have to mod any of the games to get the aspect ratio correct. My logic shifted during the PCB production to the mindset that I was making a real luxury portable...it almost needs a built in cup-holder now come to think of it...

Thanks for the offer to mill the acrylic - had all the parts for my CNC shown up when expected (and been correct) I might have been able to have done mine myself, mais ces't la vie, and I'd say you're right about shipping - especially at the moment where the world really seems to have gone crazy. Loving your build BTW - real inspiration to behold!

Thanks mate, I'm really happy with how it looks, just wish I could get the charging sorted haha.
Keep up the good work! Looking forward to seeing some PS2 classics running on that nice big screen!

 

[MRKane]

Minor update, but it's taken a lot of cobbling things together to get to this point. While I've been frowning over getting this OrangePi to behave (turns out I didn't clone the boot sector information on the armbian image and thus didn't actually have a backup when it failed) I've also been working on the case, and the shop finally got the acrylic parts cut so I could push forwards with seeing how I'd get everything to work.

Hint: I still don't have many great ideas here and figure there may be a handful of revisions.

Spoiler: Dev pics, no Fluffy

So I got the cutting guide from the shop, and promptly found that Blender wouldn't talk nice with their version of DXF files. I eventually got it open in Maya then kind of lost my cool at the software for making 3D printed parts and so exported it back to Blender again. Seriously - why does anyone use Maya? Anyway, it's nice to have a win for a change and to have things line up! Like. A. Glove.

Now, that X button. Still don't have it alined, but don't know if I should align it to the side of the case, the bottom angle, or the angle of the controls insert. I've got myself a conundrum...

The back is simply placeholder, but my "master plan" is to print these in two parts that will be pinned and glued together.

Which of course brings me to the point where naturally things don't go quite according to plan: By my measurements this should have been flush. This isn't flush. I think I'd be a clever monkey to design it slightly protruding especially because the acrylic I've got varies between 3.2 and 2.8mm depending on sheet pour and doing a "oh, but it was supposed to look like that" is an easy way to hide parts variance.

 

[Dmcke5]

So I got the cutting guide from the shop, and promptly found that Blender wouldn't talk nice with their version of DXF files. I eventually got it open in Maya then kind of lost my cool at the software for making 3D printed parts and so exported it back to Blender again. Seriously - why does anyone use Maya? Anyway, it's nice to have a win for a change and to have things line up! Like. A. Glove.

I've never used blender so I don't know for sure, but I thought it was aimed more at artistic modelling and animation rather than product design? Maya is definitely supposed to be used for modelling and animation. I did a fair bit of this at uni as most of my degree was modelling for use in 3D Games. I used 3DS max mainly but I did have a play with Maya as well.

Obviously a bit late for this project but if you haven't already, you should have a look at fusion 360. Its fairly similar in function to solidworks and would probably make your design process easier.

Otherwise though nice work, I'm really liking the look of this one! Personally I'd line the buttons up to the bottom of the console, but that's just my OCD talking

 

[MRKane]

I've never used blender so I don't know for sure, but I thought it was aimed more at artistic modelling and animation rather than product design? Maya is definitely supposed to be used for modelling and animation. I did a fair bit of this at uni as most of my degree was modelling for use in 3D Games. I used 3DS max mainly but I did have a play with Maya as well.

Obviously a bit late for this project but if you haven't already, you should have a look at fusion 360. Its fairly similar in function to solidworks and would probably make your design process easier.

Otherwise though nice work, I'm really liking the look of this one! Personally I'd line the buttons up to the bottom of the console, but that's just my OCD talking

I did look at using Fusion or Solidworks but my fear is that I'll not have enough time to undergo a learning curve in time to complete this for the competition. I've got professional experience with the other software suites so might end up struggling through with them. Although apparently Blender was first developed for designing washing machines so perhaps I'd better go with that - where Blender gets funny is with the community plugins, I was reading that 2.79 apparently has better 3D printing tools so I don't think there's a "best" answer in my case.

And the buttons! God the buttons! They've got tabs (as you'd expect) that are all on different axis, and I've got the triangle and square sorted, but keep thinking that perhaps I should just make all of them wonky AF and pretend that's intentional! BWhahahaha!

 

[MRKane]

Whelp, this is a "help" post as it's just not fun anymore.

I've burnt a week trying to get the OrangePi to communicate to the PS2 through the ethernet and while all the indicators suggest that it should be working, it's just not.

Spoiler: Digest of situation

So initially I set this up using the test case that I'd got working back at the start of the competition. Turns out I'd noted it down wrong and one of the connected pairs was around the wrong way, but this wasn't before I'd pulled everything up and gone over all of my connections. Weirdly the OrangePi ethernet port has a different pin slant to everything else I've got (British/American?) which made matters more complicated. In the end a bit of educated guesswork and noting down what didn't work turned out to be the answer:

Corrected wiring diagram:

A bit to unpack here, and I'd love everyones insight on it: So oddly enough it'd seem that I need both the 33nF caps, and the ethernet transformer in place for it to function. Now in my PCB design I moved the transformer off of the PS2 PCB and downstream, now I'm wondering if this is the cause of my problems so would love someone with more knows than me to suggest a course of action here:

At that point I was sick of finicky magnet wire and just opted for some more MS-friendly ribbon cable. You can see the transformer in the middle of the picture there - should I mount it back on the PS2 board?

Finally on this topic: Fun times in almost working but naturally not managing to fix whatever the issue is:

Amusingly as it turned out if the OrangePi was hard-shutdown with a power off it'd occasionally need a good cycle restart before it'd start working again, so there's every possibility I got it going but the Pi just wasn't working. To add to this entire mess it's getting to the point where some of the pads on my test board have started to lift from the concessive soldering and testing. The solution of course was to up my game! So today I got my act together and put a clever little script on the Pi to shut it down at a button press, and plan to drive it through the system control PIF as I'll not be using two of the pins that were hallmarked for the BMS.

And a quick brightener which I know will please anyone who's as OCD as myself

Spoiler: Buttons aligned! (sufficiently)

 

[MRKane]

Well this has been a fun 24 hours, but I'm finally getting answers. Remember the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

So I broke everything down into a collection of paired experiments and to save boring you all to death my breakdown is happening because the distance from the PS2 Ethernet transformer to the BCM5241... chip is too far. That's it - murder she wrote. So tomorrows experiment will involve making use of the 33nF caps I've got lying around to see if they can solve the signal issues I've got here over long distances.

Quick community question: The PS2 ethernet only seems to use lines 1&2 and 7&8, but does the transformer require the other lines to be intact for standard function?

Spoiler: Pictures and a totally out of place video of Fluffy with a pizza

This works, standard crossover wiring, no caps or anything apart from shoddy ribbon cable so it looks so horribly wrong...but my Playstation 2 thinks it's so so right.

Where as this doesn't work. Possibly to do with impedance, or something that I don't understand because I missed this paper in my Biochemistry course, or perhaps because the wiring is terribly ugly - that's also a possibility.

And finally as promised: Fluffy trying to decide how to come at a whole pizza. Big decisions for a little bird. I've not let him around my work area since he swallowed a header pin, and I now actually cover it entirely with a drop-sheet.

 

[cheese]

Quick community question: The PS2 ethernet only seems to use lines 1&2 and 7&8, but does the transformer require the other lines to be intact for standard function?

Sounds about right, that would mean it uses "fast ethernet" which only uses 2 of the 4 differential pairs in the ethernet cable.

 

[MRKane]

Quick update: Wiring some 33nF caps between the ethernet transformer and the PS2 resulted in no chatter or any read. Not that I'm sure of my soldering mind as my test board is getting pretty beat up at this stage. My guess is that there's just too much noise, or it's simply too far away but if anyone knows the solution to this then I'm all ears!

 

[MRKane]

As one last ditch effort I tried to copy the wiring that GMan had from his RaspberryPi through to the PS2 (assuming that the Ethernet pinout was straight-through to pins 1,2,3&6) but didn't get any chatter when I did that, and ye olde 310 for my efforts. So my final conclusion is that the OrangePi can only do what the Pulse chip really can do. I guess I'll just have to make use of the added space and fill it with things like: cooling, bracing, and swish style!

Spoiler: Check my wiring! Also: Fluffy

Fluffy checking over my setup:

Fluffy trying to seperate anything that hasn't been nailed down because portables should never have loose components!