Monthly Archives: March 2014

Simple 6X USB Charger with Current Monitor

This is a simple 6 port USB device charger with a individual current monitor on each port. The charging current is indicated using RGB LEDs. Blue means slow charge (under 250mA), green means 250mA to 750mA, red means over 750mA, and purple means over 1500mA (for tablets). This circuit involves an ATmega328P (if you do hobby electronics, I bet you have plenty spares of these), INA169 (check out this breakout board), and a OKR-T10-W12.

While this project is not as impressive as my other projects in terms of difficulty, I soldered and Continue reading

Kinetis Microcontroller SRAM Region Hard Faults

I am doing a project that involves a K10DX128 microcontroller from Freescale, which is advertised to have 128 KB of flash memory and 16 KB of SRAM memory. It’s similar to the microcontroller used by the Teensy 3.0 platform. The project involves a lot of dynamically allocated memory because it deals with a lot of files inside a file system.

I ran into one of those “sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t happen” bugs that causes a hard fault. Tracing the source of the hard fault lead to a few ordinary SRAM storage instructions, and apparently it happened half way through processing the list of files. This made me suspect that the memory was allocated incorrectly, and I checked all the things I should check(the address of the allocation, how much memory I should have, the status of my stack, the linker script, etc).
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Keyboard and Mouse for PlayStation 4 Games (second prototype)

Why did you do this?

I like playing shooter games on PC but my laptop is too weak to play them. Game consoles do not support USB keyboards and USB mouse, they only support gamepads. Gamepad controls are not suitable for shooter games, using a keyboard and mouse is much more comfortable for gameplay.

How does it work?

I designed a circuit that features a microcontroller and USB hub. The keyboard and mouse plugs into the USB hub, and then the microcontroller takes the data from the keyboard and mouse, translates them to the data format used by the PlayStation 4. It does the translation in a way as though the mouse was the right thumbstick, and the keys are mapped to buttons (the WASD keys are mapped to the left thumbstick).








If you want to buy one from me, you can’t, I don’t want to sell anything. If you want to buy something similar from somebody else, try the XIM4 (my top choice), CronusMAX, Venom X, etc. (if there’s another product you would like to see on this list, give me one to try out first, and I’ll add it if it works)

Development Story

Latest News – July 20 2014

I wanted to share this story because I am very happy that I finally managed to get this far! Anybody who is attempting this and thought it was impossible to do can now breath a sigh of relief because it definitely can be done.

I have already accomplished a similar project that worked with a PS3 (UsbXlater), something that connected to the PS3 via USB that translated keyboard and mouse data format to gamepad data format.

Once the PS4 launched, I reversed engineered the USB protocol used by the DualShock, and then attempted the same technique. But… Continue reading