Nintendo DS Lite case mod

Many years ago, I bought a white Nintendo DS Lite.  I loved the form factor, the look of it and the games I could play on it.  There were a lot of games for it, and for the GameBoy Advance which I already had which I'd love to play on it.

Over time, I've gotten a R4DS card so I could play homebrew (yeah, let's go with that) and use it as a kind of PDA type of thing. I also got an EZFlash V for the same reasons. For homebrew. Because that's still a thing, right?  (The screenshot above shows the R4DS interface, which I've re-skinned to like AmigaDOS 1.3 because that's something I do.

Anyway, at some point, I got a completely transparent shell for it, which was really neat for a while.  It was a pain to move the guts over to that shell, but it looked neat for a while.  Then The upper screen failed and the touch scanner failed on the bottom.  So I replaced those.  Then the right shoulder button failed, so I replaced that... which never really worked well, as the button broke off of the main board. There just wasn't enough structure there to support it.

Fast forward a few years, and I picked up a European black DS Lite in a trade for some old GBA stuff I didn't want anymore.  That one worked GREAT, except that the screen hinge was completely destroyed.  I used that for a while, but ended up shelving it.

For a while I've been meaning to take the best parts of all of this and put together one fully functional DS Lite.

I had planned to take the top screen from the black unit, but the ribbon cable broke while I was removing it from that unit.

What I ended up with was this:

• Case enclosures - White
• Top and shoulder buttons, switch cover plastics - Black
• Upper Screen - White (replacement, colors aren't perfect on it, but it's good)
• Lower Screen - Black
• Motherboard - Black
• Battery - Black
• Wifi Antenna - Black (The cable was broken on the white one)
• Rubber feet, screw covers - Black
• Stylus - White (Black one is on order)

I think the final form here is pretty sharp.  Best of all, it's fully functional again! Yay!

Repairing a Digital Camera: Battery Explosion!

I like to collect old pocket computers and gadgets. One of the things I encounter often is exploded batteries.  I recently rescued a Canon Powershot A520, and it seemed to be completely dead, probably due to poor battery contact due to the previous batteries exploding.

I've read stories of other people using watered down vinegar to remove the alkaline, but I instead use just vinegar.  I dip a paper towel in it, and saturate the affected areas.  If you listen closely, you can hear it fizzing.  Ssszszszsszszszs!

After a few saturations and wipes with paper toweling, I had removed most of the alkaline gunk.  From here you can clean it with a baking soda paste, but for this, I just decided to scrape the contacts a bit.

Once it was cleaned up, I put in some old AA batteries and it powered right up!  I dropped in my old 2 gig EyeFi Geo card ($20 from Woot many moons ago), and it worked!  I recharged some high capacity AAs overnight and dropped them in.  Then things started going badly...

It would power on, then immediately turn off.  I tried my second set of rechargables, and the same thing happened.  I re-cleaned the contacts, but that didn't seem to help.  It was at this point that I thought I knew why it had been dropped in the recycle pile.

Then I realized that my AA rechargables put out 1.2v each, rather than the 1.5v of alkalines.  The camera has a requirement printed on it of 3.15 volts.  1.2 plus 1.2 does not equal 3.15.... I found a fresh pair of alkalines and dropped them in, and sure enough, it works perfectly!

As a sidenote, I also set up my computer at home to host the EyeFi software, and it drops the downloaded pictures into a Dropbox directory.  Now, all of the pictures taken with the camera are instantly shared when I'm home. I have no reason to manually sync the card physically now. Yay!