scanlime034 – Tiny Oven Kit

This cute 3D soldering kit makes for a chill build video. The package comes our way as a crowdfunding reward, from pitching in to help Signal Ditch buy a reflow oven. Now we can all enjoy the sights and sounds of the build, but sadly I can’t share the sweet epoxy fumes. (Please do not breathe the epoxy.)

Thank you so much for watching, subscribing, and sharing my videos. And a special thanks to my supporters on Patreon and Liberapay, where recurring donations make this content possible.

Source code from Our friends the Signal Ditch.

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Each episode is compiled together from many livestreams which you can hang out with on the companion scanlime-in-progress channel.

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bigclive’s LED Tree – scanlime:025

Join me in assembling a surprise LED lighting kit from bigclive himself!

Check out his channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom

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Boldport Stringy Synthesizer – scanlime:024

Last month’s Boldport Club kit was a collaboration with Madlab to produce this beautiful little guitar synthesizer kit, the Stringy!

You can learn more about the Boldport Club and get your own delighful kits by signing up at https://www.boldport.club/

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scanlime:014 / Boldport #2 – Superhero

Finally, another Boldport video! This time a short music video based on the Engineer Superhero kit, assembled in original form and in a variant that includes a coin cell to power the LED and a piezo button to charge the 2N7000 MOSFET gate and make the LED glow for a while.

The sound track was something I made specifically for this vid; I put it on soundcloud too: https://soundcloud.com/scanlime/metal-piranha

DSi RAM tracing

It seems like a lot of people have been seeing my Flickr photostream and wondering what I must be up to- especially after my photos got linked on hackaday and reddit. Well, I’ve been meaning to write a detailed blog post explaining it all- but I keep running out of time. So I guess a “short” blog post is better than nothing.

The executive summary is that I’ve been working on making it possible to run homebrew games on the DSi. If you’ve used The Homebrew Channel on the Wii, you know what I’m talking about- we’d basically like to have the same thing for the DSi. And as it turns out, the DSi has a lot in common with the Wii.

I haven’t been working on this project alone. I’ve been collaborating with the excellent software and hardware engineers in Team Twiizers, the group responsible for The Homebrew Channel. Bushing has written a couple blog posts about our DSi efforts so far: one on the RAM tracing effort in general, and one with a sample trace.

My role in this project lately has been building hardware and software for a tool which is effectively a low-level CPU debugger for the DSi. It attaches to the RAM bus between the RAM and CPU, it’s capable of tracing all traffic in ‘real-time’ (after slowing down the system clock so the required bandwidth fits in USB 2.0), and just this week I got RAM injection working. The hardware interposes on one of the chip select signals between the CPU and RAM. If an address floats by that we want to patch, the hardware can quickly disable the real RAM chip and drive new data onto the bus as the CPU continues to read. It’s a very effective technique, and my hardware has a pretty capable system for storing and retrieving up to 16 kB of patch data now.

So why is all the complex hardware needed? Well, we hit two big dead-ends:

  • Several of us managed to run code from within a DSi-enhanced game using modified save files, but most of the interesting hardware on the DSi (like the SD card slot, and the internal flash memory) is disabled when these games are running. The earlier Team Twiizers Classic Word Games hack, WinterMute’s cookhack, and my own cookinject all suffer from this problem.
  • I’ve been able to read and write flash memory for a while. This isn’t as interesting as it may sound, since nearly all of the flash is encrypted. However, by running a lot of tests where we modified or compared the encrypted data, we were still able to gain a lot of knowledge about the layout of the flash memory, and some information about how the system boots.

What we’d really like to do is understand more about how the console’s main menu works, and how software is installed and loaded on the DSi. The best way to do this seemed to be RAM tracing. It required an FPGA and a lot of crazy soldering under a microscope, but now it’s working and we’re well on our way to unlocking the secrets of DSi homebrew.

If you’re interested in following our efforts to make homebrew possible on the DSi, definitely subscribe to Bushing’s blog at hackmii.com. He understands the Wii (and by extension, the DSi) better than I ever will, and he’s great at writing about it.

I have a Flickr set with lots more photos, but these are two of my favorite. The first is a photo of the entire setup as it’s currently configured. The second is a picture of the craziest of the microscopic solder joints in this project. This is where I separated the chip-select signal I mentioned above, giving the FPGA the ability to sit between the CPU and RAM. The trace I’m tapping into is buried under four other PCB layers. For a sense of scale, the orange enameled wire is 32 AWG, or about 0.2mm in diameter. Normal 30 AWG wire-wrapping wire is actually only the third smallest size of wire I’ve been using in this project 🙂

Debugging setup with new FPGA

Via excavation closeup

If you’re interested in the C and Verilog source code, it’s in Subversion as usual.

DSi hacking, BGA rework

I got a Nintendo DSi earlier this month. It’s a really cute little console, and a nice revision to the DS Lite. Screens are slightly larger, CPU is about twice as fast, 4x the RAM. And of course it has these camera thingies. Other folks have teardowns online with internal photos aplenty 🙂

So, I spent a week or so tooling around with the DSi doing normal consumer and/or homebrew things with it. Played some The World Ends With You, got an Acekard 2i and tried running some homebrew. Its DS compatibility mode seems to be pretty good. The only compatibility bug I bumped into was running my work-in-progress Robot Odyssey port. It mostly worked, but there was a little bit of crackling in the audio. Not surprising, I’m doing the audio in a somewhat unconventional way, and it doesn’t work properly in any DS emulator either 🙂

The DSi is pretty cute, but it would be nice if we could use its new features for homebrew software. It would be especially cool if you could run homebrew directly from its built-in SD card reader, without the need for any special-purpose hardware. That would really open the door to some cool indie games that nearly anyone could play.

Need to satisfy my curiosity, then. Out come the jewler’s screwdrivers, antistatic mat, and SMD rework tools…

There are a few other people working on hacking the DSi from other avenues. Team Twiizers just released a video of a save game exploit that they’re using to run code in DSi mode. This is pretty cool, and as far as I know it’s the first time a hobbyist has been able to run code in DSi mode. I’m not sure how much if any of the new hardware they’ve managed to reverse engineer through this hack.

There are also a handful of Wii hackers that have noticed that the DSi has pretty much the same file format for its downloadable games, so they’re trying to come up with a way to install homebrew DSiWare apps. Unfortunately, they need the system’s private key- and brute-forcing it doesn’t seem too promising. One way to get this private key would be to extract it from the DSi’s firmware.

The thing that interests me the most right now is figuring out how the DSi boots. There are plenty of other layers of software that you can exploit from the outside- but the bootloader and built-in firmware seems like the best starting point for any serious effort to reverse engineer the DSi’s hardware.

The DSi has upgradeable firmware, and there’s only one visible place that it could be stored: a 256 MB NAND flash chip. This is actually an embedded MMC (eMMC) chip from Samsung. It’s electrically pretty much the same as an MMC card, but in a tiny BGA form factor. It is wired directly up to the CPU, which would indicate that there is some kind of hardware or software bootloader that knows how to pull code off of the eMMC chip during early boot. This probably means there’s a mask ROM in the same package as the CPU. It would also make sense that this ROM would know how to write an initial firmware image to the eMMC chip during manufacturing, since there is no other way to access the eMMC chip after it’s soldered to the DSi’s main board.

I was hoping that the MMC data lines would be accessible via some of the many test points. None of them were obviously related to the NAND, though. I tried probing the SPI bus, where the original DS kept its firmware, but the eMMC chip was definitely on a separate bus. It didn’t help at all that the DSi refuses to boot unless every single one of its peripherals are attached, so this makes it rather hard to poke around the board’s test points while it’s running.

At this point I assumed that the traces running from eMMC chip to CPU were completely buried. My last recourse: desolder the eMMC chip, and hook it up to some kind of test jig that would let me read back its contents. Then perhaps I could copy it to a normal MMC card, and wire up an MMC socket on the DSi.

After practicing my BGA rework technique a bit, I desoldered the eMMC chip. If you power the DSi on without the eMMC chip, it displays a nice hexadecimal error code. This would seem to indicate that there is indeed a mask ROM in the CPU package- a hardware bootloader wouldn’t be smart enough to display a “nice” error like this.

Under the NAND flash

There was a pleasant surprise underneath the eMMC chip: All of the data signals were in fact accessible on nearby components or vias. I didn’t find them earlier, since I couldn’t really poke around with the ‘scope and have the board access the eMMC at the same time. But, armed with this knowledge, I could switch to a simpler approach: Solder the eMMC chip back on, then build a passive sniffer that tells me exactly what reads and writes the DSi’s CPU makes.

By some miracle, I managed to get the eMMC chip soldered back on successfully. The DSi’s mainboard is a huge pain to do BGA rework on, at least with the tools I have. It has so many ground/power planes and fills that the board is really hard to keep hot with just a hot-air rework tool.

My poor DSi then is ‘mostly’ back in one piece. Now I’m working on the next step: Hooking up an FPGA that can dump all the memory reads/writes over USB 🙂

More stuff: There are a few more pictures on flickr, and I started a thread with a few more technical details on the gbadev forums.