Worklog PIS2, a long overdue ps2 portable

[darkwing]

So for the last 4/5 days I’ve been trying to figure this wiring out for my Raspberry Pi2.

I tried finding ethernet port 10/100 schematics on obscure manufacture website, measuring voltage on the lines and tested around 20 something way to wire that thing up in vain… until just an hour ago when I had a light bulb moment.

Instead of looking for that ethernet port diagram I could also look for a schematic of the Pi chip which takes care of that port and trace it back to the point on the board.


Found that diagram and found the data lines point base on this.

Then re-wired the pi to the PS2 and Voila! I wasn't far off, only 1 wire was wrong.

I must have made a noise that probably no grown man should make when I finally saw that screen after seeing that dreadful “300: SMB not found” error so many times.

For anyone interested in the same setup with a Raspberry Pi2 or the original Pi3 you can see the 4 data lines on my note pad in the pic above, that's the top view of Pi board.

 

[CLAUDIO]

Great job!
I started a project inspired in your.

 

[cheese]

Long wires are nice antennas, that's probably running at 10 speeds instead of 10/100... You should shorten the wires, bring the pairs close together, and solder the caps directly to the PS2. The image I posted was a snipit from some big doc about ethernet, another big point they made was about interference and how you should keep trace length to a minimum, avoid being near noisy things like power supplies, etc

 

[darkwing]

@CLAUDIO thanks

@cheese Hey man, thanks for the tips. I will keep that in mind during the assembly phase. This was just a spare PS2 to test the correct wiring as I didn't want to mess up my cut up board. I've got some SMB caps on the way too that was ordered after making sure that I've got it working.

 

[darkwing]

Last week has been quite a productive one.

I've done a diagram of the wiring between the PS2 and Pi2/3 so that I don't have to figure it again when I'm ready to wire them up and though to put it here if anyone wants to do the same thing. The Pi2 run pretty cool (and probably Pi3 too) without heatsink which is one less thing to think of.

Edit: this diagram is actually not working by itself. You will need the ethernet port transformers and the cap are not needed in that case. See update from 19/08/19.

The PTH08080 has been wired and is working as intended, that will power the Pi and audio amp.

The fan combo has been glued down with some Electrolube TBS and is working pretty well.
It has been wired on 3v on the back of the board.

All was well and good until I tried to fit the board and heatsink combo back in the case.
I didn't remember the allocated space for it was meant to be slightly more lower to the right so it wasn't fitting anymore.

I had to look at cutting up that small corner when the back of the case was almost ready for the last coat of paint.

I cute up a small piece from an ABS case and glue it down with my Acetone/ABS glue, filled it and sand it.

The front of the case had also a final coat of paint so I will be able to start fitting the parts back into it soon which is exiting.

 

[MRKane]

Forget the competition, this really is the thread that I check every day for - the hurdles, the stories, and the fine craftsmanship - it's all fantastic!

 

[Botond]

Can somebody help me in building my own version of this?

 

[darkwing]

@MRKane Thanks man, I’m glade that you enjoy those updates.
I try to share the ups and downs because a big part of this type of project is about troubleshooting and problem solving.

Trying to find a way to do something and making it work in the best of my abilities is the part that make me tick.


@Botond If you are just getting started you should probably look around the forum first.
A big part of this kind of projects is researching and finding information on what work and what doesn’t.
Looking at the different worklogs will give you an idea of the parts/tools you will need and how put them together.

Also having at least a basic understanding on how electronics work will help you especially when something goes wrong which will definitely happen at some stage.

I would also advise to start small, my first project was basically 2 side of a controller which was epoxy to a Polycase ZN-45 with a Screen epoxy at the top. It was heavy as hell and was not the smallest portable but that taught me a lot about electronics, soldering, battery management, case making, ergonomics, painting and the list goes on.

 

[Botond]

@darkwing Thank you for the recommendation. I may be a newbie on this site but I made some much harder projects too in the past and I know my electronics more than well enough.

 

[darkwing]

And another productive week as passed, if I keep going like that I might actually finish this thing.


Case update
So started last week with adding 2 battery holder to the case, had to shave a few millimetre for the base to make them fit. While doing that I broke the the screw post and the little bracket holding it which was suppose to support the bottom right hand side of the PS2 board.
The other one are pretty solid but that one was quite weak so was not surprise.

I setup that small piece of ABS in the shape of a hock to hold that corner now and I can say that PS2 board is not going anywhere.

The bottom left corner will hold all the power stuff and I’m thinking to use a small prototype board to go from the ports, switch, battery, cap and 5v step down.

Audio
Next was the audio, so far I’ve tried to be methodical by always test parts/wiring prior to place them in the case and soldering them to the boards but I though that the audio was going to be so easy that I skip that process. What could go wrong when all the points are clearly label on the board… and ended up working on it for around 3 days on and off

First of I tried removing the onboard tack switch and ended up being a bit too rough by the look of it. the trace came with it when I was trying to desolder it. I had to solder a wire to the point.

I then set the PAM8803 board in the case with some double sided foam tape, wired it but there was no sounds although I made sure the SDN point was on high. After using the multimeter and not finding anything I decided to check the back of the board and broke a component which stayed glue in the tape.

Luckily I ordered 2 boards so I tried the second one, by itself this time, without much success either.
Then after poking around I realised that it was because the audio jack ground, which I had wired on the left audio out ground.
It was shorting with the left audio channel when the speakers are connected.
Soldering it to the input ground instead just solve it for me.

After all that drama I wired the LCD control to the front buttons

And finally wired the FreeMcboot memory card to the second port

So now we have video(VGA, composite), audio, the controller, the volume / screen controls and freemcboot setup. The only thing holding me back has been the back of the case which I’m trying to get ready to paint, after that I should be ready to assemble the other parts together, till next time.

 

[MRamli]

Hi sir
are you have fb acciunt or telegram accout ? i have many question to ask you

 

[Nold]

Hi sir
are you have fb acciunt or telegram accout ? i have many question to ask you

If you have short questions, feel free to join out discord!
If you have many/long questions, just open up a thread in the forums.

 

[darkwing]

One more week and one more weekly update.
I had to hold up on doing anything major on this project for a few days as I had to catch up on some weekend time with my son.
In that time I just did a few bits here and there.

The case has probably been the part of this project that has had the most issues, if only 3d printers were a thing when I started this project…

The front just needed a coat of primer, 2 layers of paint and a clear coat and that was done but the back for some reason kept having marks even after applying fillers. The original lettering had to be covered because half of the letters disappeared after trying to sand off some of those marks.

The blue grill was also already glue to the case so I had to cover the cut out lettering to avoid having dark blue paint in it.
I was using some Tamiya filler at the begging with mixed result and ended up going back to good old Plasti-bond( Bondo equivalent in Oz).

The challenging part was applying it to the lettering under the cut out and tried to even out the shape without covering the cutout letter, this created a slight curve in that area.

So after 5 weeks on and off on this I reached a stage where I’m ok with it.
It’s not perfect, still some slight difference in the paint texture but it’s much better than what it was.
I applied a flat clear coat Tuesday and happy with the finish.

Mid last week I also worked on sorting out the the power wiring. First I went back using the original PS2 power jack for the play port as the one I had order was actually not the right size for the original power cable. Totally forgot only 1 side of the jack is for ground so I had a few minutes of head scratching when it wasn’t working and had wire it on the other side but at the end it work out quite well. I added later on the step down and a 2200uf cap to be able to switch between battery and play mode.

I’ve been contemplating modifying my controller wiring to shorten the wires to the PS2 board and clean up the spaghetti look. It used to be clean but I had to pull it out to figure out some issue a few weeks ago. It’s probably not critical but it’s has been bothering me a bit…might do that in the next few days if I get the time.

 

[tasiban]

Hi!
Sorry for my English.
Poke your finger on how to connect my batteries to the 9000x board.
A thousand apologies.

 

[hazardousracerx]

Last week has been quite a productive one.

I've done a diagram of the wiring between the PS2 and Pi2/3 so that I don't have to figure it again when I'm ready to wire them up and though to put it here if anyone wants to do the same thing. The Pi2 run pretty cool (and probably Pi3 too) without heatsink which is one less thing to think of.

Thanks for the diagram @darkwing, this has saved me quite a bit of time and thanks to @Gman & @cheese for the original work on this.

Regarding the 33nF caps between the Pi and the PS2 Ethernet ports, the Pi 3 has 4 sets of pads on the top side of the board labeled c86, c87, c88, c89 directly behind the ethernet port. From testing, the sets of cap pads are tied directly to the 4 pins on the ethernet port for TX+/- & RX+/-.

Rather than soldering on the PS2 side of the ethernet connection, couldn't we just use those pads and place the caps on the Pi side pads or does it provide a cleaner signal to place them on the PS2 side of the connection?

 

[darkwing]

Thanks for the diagram @darkwing, this has saved me quite a bit of time and thanks to @Gman & @cheese for the original work on this.

Regarding the 33nF caps between the Pi and the PS2 Ethernet ports, the Pi 3 has 4 sets of pads on the top side of the board labeled c86, c87, c88, c89 directly behind the ethernet port. From testing, the sets of cap pads are tied directly to the 4 pins on the ethernet port for TX+/- & RX+/-.

Rather than soldering on the PS2 side of the ethernet connection, couldn't we just use those pads and place the caps on the Pi side pads or does it provide a cleaner signal to place them on the PS2 side of the connection?

No worries, happy that helped you. It sounds to me like this should work although I'm not sure that would really improve the signal. The signal was fine even with my spaghetti wires in that photo. The games I tested worked without any issues but granted that wasn't in a tight space with a lot of components around so as long as you keep them short enough that should be fine.


Edit: scratch all the above about the Raspberry PI2, what worked for me is in my update from the 19/08/19

 

[darkwing]

So last weekend I manage to get some time to try finish this thing, which took a bit of negotiation with my partner.
So ended up spending around 8 hours work across the remaining section of the Portable.

I made a basic prototype board to manage the different voltages from the charge/play ports and battery.

I setup the different ports in the back of the case, set some screw post for the power board and wire all the power stuff together( battery, PCB, ports). Then I placed the Pi2 in and wired the USB port.

After all that I placed the PS2 board in the case and wired power to the different boards ( screen, audio amp, PS2 and Pi2 ) and finally wired the memory card from slot 1 to the PS2 board.

I closed it all up and turn it on and everything work… until I tried to load the games and saw the haunting error “310: no network”.
Sadly I realised that I’ve never tried to connect the Pi 2 to this board prior to this.

So for the last few days I’ve been trouble shooting this and running through a list of possible issues.
I wired the Pi2 to a different PS2 board which ended up working so it cleared up the Pi2 and the USB wiring.
I checked the pins for shorts and traced them back to the chip. I examined the board to see if there was anything amiss and end up taking the PS2 board out of the Portable to see if it could have been due to interference but none the above worked…

I might double check some of the above again during the next few days but otherwise I will probably need to cut up another board and prep it.

It’s a bit annoying to get this close and having that big of a issue but I guess on the flip side going with a new board will give me the possibility to change a few things that I didn’t like with the current wiring and other stuff.

 

[MRKane]

I've been helping develop little server devices for a mate and had to relocate the ethernet board on a little Orange Pi, and it simply died, which is annoying as hell especially when you've got everything together. My heart goes out to you here!

 

[darkwing]

@MRKane Thanks mate for the kind words, for sure that’s a bit disheartening when you are so close.
Sometime just taking a small break helps to comeback with a clearer mindset, at least that’s what has been working for me.

So on my side I had a fairly packed modding weekend, pretty much from morning to evening.
I did more testing on my board but couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it so I ended up going for door number 2, cutting a brand new board.

So this time before doing anything to it I tried soldering the RPI2 to the ethernet points directly and it worked straight away.

I took apart my second 79001 NTSC board which was from a sliver slim and was surprise when I saw the layout being different than my first 79001 NTSC.
Looked almost like a PAL board with that lid sensor on the top right corner.

Then I removed the ports from the board and traced the lines to square of the board

Cut it up, wired the different connectors, wired the memory card and wired the PI2 to the ethernet point which… didn’t work…
At that point this whole thing didn’t make sense, why would it work just an hour ago and stop working after the board was prep.

So fast forward to around 2 hours later where I had tried to rewire multiple time and tried different length of wires to the points where the Pi2 was only a few centimetre from the PS2 board but nothing worked.

Until I realised that all the direct wiring I did prior was to the ethernet point when the ethernet jack was still in. Solder back the jack and sure enough it worked straight away.

I work my way from there, desoldering pin by pin until it stopped working and what was missing is to have one of
the middle pin solder to complete the (ground?) traces on the back of the board. So for it to work I needed 5 wires to the PS2 board.

I then tried to remove the ethernet jack and solder to those point directly with the caps but again no go, so the transformer in the jack looks like are need for this to work.

Then I remember when I was trying to find out the PI2 wiring I took apart the RPI2 ethernet port and it looked like transformers in that ports where on a small board which looked more manageable that the big PS2 ethernet port.

Long story short, did some more testing and indeed the PI2 ethernet port board worked a treat and is quite small vs a full size ethernet port.

Before putting it all back I also looked at the fan which was bothering me from last time.
The fan which I had cut down around 4 years ago was way to noisy.

I tried greasing it but that didn’t do it so I had to cut up a brand new fan and go through the
painstaking job of removing the bottom part of the fan which is made of one solid aluminium piece. took around an hour only for that last part but at least now I have a quiet fan.

I wired all up along with that PI2 ethernet board and…

It is finally alive and working as it should!
Will be posting this in the complete section soon but I might do a video first when I get some time.

 

[hazardousracerx]

Great job finding the problem with the Pi Ethernet. I found the chip in the pi ethernet port and was planning to use it the same way. I found some info on other forums while looking up pi ethernet pinout and found that the Raspberry Pi will not communicate over ethernet without the transformers in place, even over short distances.

Found this about the pi ethernet port. It seems that the Pi only uses pin 1-6 of the ethernet port. 7 & 8 are completely disconnected which explains why only 6 of the 8 pins have a test pad on the bottom side of the Pi.

Pins 1/3 are Tx+/-
Pins 4/6 are Rx+/-
Pins 2/5 connect to 3v3 on the Pi side to power the transformers in the little chip.

Glad you got it working and I hope this can help others looking to accomplish the same.