In the past 1000 days, 2.74 years, I got engaged, moved, got married, had my house burn down, lost my father, designed a new house, and began reconstruction. Through vacations, weddings, funerals, late nights, long days, great highs, and terrible lows, the NYT crossword has been my daily meditation. I guess I’ll try for 2000 days now. Who knows what life will bring in the next 2.74 years?
I’m so pleased. This was the vision I had for this Pocket when I bought it from the Goodwill last year. Since then it has traveled the world with me, but finding AAA batteries on the road was sometimes impossible. Now, with its IPS display, BoxyPixel metal buttons, upgraded speaker, and USBC charging, it is my ultimate Pocket build. I learned a lot along the way, and that’s all we can really ask for, right?
I’d say give the GilTesa kit a shot if you want to. The instructions were clear and, well I wouldn’t say easy, but easy to follow. They included the wrong battery connector in the kit, unfortunately, but I happened to have some correct ones on hand that I could use (JST 1mm 2-pin). Soldering the battery leads was way easier than I had hyped it up to be.
Thanks for the encouragement y’all, it kept me going!
Never would have considered looking on a “regular” big box store for a (product) Red iPhone 13 Mini case, but stumbled across it when looking for something else. Who knew? Thought sure I’d have to get one used on eBay.
So this long weekend I dove into the GilTesa USBC mod for my Game Boy Pocket. I’d like to preface this by saying I really have no business doing this. I hadn’t touched a soldering iron before my wife got me one this last Christmas. I only say this to encourage those who think soldering is too hard to put aside your fears, and, if you’re interested, get a cheap iron and give it a shot. It’s opened doors for me I never knew I could walk through. This is Part I: getting the electronics sorted. Part II is trimming the shell and soldering up the real battery. Then it will be…done?
Previously I added an IPS display to the pocket, since the original screens are oh so quaint and useless. The first step in this mod is to remove a bunch of components from the board that are in the way. The USBC port goes where the wall-charger port was. Removal of these pieces ranged from super easy, in the case of some resisters and the old charge port (using my new hot air rework gun made that last one a breeze, pun absolutely intended), to hair-tearing-out challenging, in the case of the old AAA battery contacts, which were not only soldered in, but also physically clipped to the board inside the solder joint. Holy moly.
Gil (I’ll call them Gil, I don’t know) tried their best to make this mod “really straightforward”, but there are a bunch of places where you have to solder through 2 boards to a ground terminal, and getting heat all the way down the hole to make sure the boards connect to each other is insanely hard. All the heat dissipates into the ground circuit and solder just sits there in the hole, cold as stone. This was definitely the hardest part, and should have been one of the easiest.
The usbc port attached, and the main board soldered down, I opted to include the light board so I could see when the battery was charging and full. This thing is tiny, about the size of a pea in diameter. I soldered, desoldered, and re-soldered it to the board 3 times, just to get the alignment right. In the instructions he tells you to check the connection with a multimeter, and I got nothing. I think he mixed up red and black in the instructions, though, because I got a good reading when I switched them different from his photo. Again, let me stress, I have no idea what I’m doing. Anyway, I decided to move on.
Finally, you solder some tiny wires for the lights, volume knob, and speaker. That wasn’t too hard, but you have to be pretty precise, and I haven’t done the fitment yet so we’ll see if I need to redo it all. Gil included a JST connector to wire to a battery of your choice, and unfortunately it is the wrong connector (looks like a 2mm instead of a 1mm), but luckily I happen to have some 1mm JST connectors that I use in my iPod mods, and they fit the battery connector on the new board perfectly.
So, finally, after two solid days of being hunched over my workbench, I stuck a game into the cartridge slot, plugged in a battery with a correct connector as a test, and flipped the power switch. That Nintendo bling never sounded so good! I’m very excited. I’ll post here again if I can get it all closed up and working later. For now, I’m done. Thanks for reading! Go try it yourself! (This is not legal advice)
So I’m sort of in love with JST connectors, and have taken to incorporating them into mods so everything can be pulled apart easily without desoldering.
In this case I just wanted to see if I could add a haptic engine directly to the click speaker without removing it. Most videos of this process show the click speaker removed. Since it’s a rather sensitive solder job with lots of melty plastic around, I just wanted to do it once. If I want to upgrade the haptic engine in the future to something stronger, or just remove it entirely, I wanted some flexibility. The JST connectors I got only have wires attached on the male side, so I bent up the prongs on the female side and soldered wires to them. After connecting the wires from the male side to the haptic engine (Mini 13 Taptic Engine), I bent the ribbon cable to make some room and carefully, quickly soldered to the 2 speaker connections with my finest iron tip.
7th gen, iFlash uDual w/ 512gb (cut down to small size), 3800mah battery (has a smaller footprint than the 3000 lengthwise, so it has extra room for my bulky connections), all easily fitting in a thin back.
I posted about adding a haptic engine without removing the speaker on this sub a little while ago, and I wanted to thank you all for the encouragement. It gave me the confidence to try it.
I’ve got a sorta-working 5.0 gen classic motherboard and 5 of these rather pretty iBober usbc boards so I thought I’d just dive in to the instructions. Any tips or advice is welcome. I’ve done soldering projects at this tiny scale, and projects with this many connections, but never both. I also don’t have a hot air station so I don’t know how it’ll be taking off the 30 pin connector. Big thanks to u/Positive_Friend_7399 for making these and shipping them surprisingly fast considering they went 1/3 of the way around the world. If this works I’ll do it for a “real” one.
The soup was great. Prince of Whales is a whale-watching agency.
I came across a pile of identical PCBs at an electronics surplus store in LA, and I found this one in the pile. It was the only one marked this way. Was this a commemorative one celebrating the Curiosity project? Anyone know what these might have been used for? They’re thick as hell lol.
I know I’m in the minority, but I like the clicker. I also like the haptic engine, I installed it on another iPod kit with the clicker speaker already removed. Every video shows desoldering the clicker speaker and soldering the haptic to those pads. Can I just solder to those points on the speaker and get the best of both worlds?
Got this nano 6th yesterday (love) and found a LunaTik watch band for it. Wanted silver to match, but they only had orange, so I went with it. It was only after that that I realized I had a bit of a theme going.
5th gen Nano is original to me, from back in the day.
7th gen Classic was inspired by Teenage Engineering and CW&T
iPhone 4s with swapped backplate I’ve had since it was new.
Then I saw that the “clear” clickwheel on my 5th Gen also ran in the same circles.
I mean, I like orange, but wasn’t like an “everything must be orange” kinda person. Reminds me of that woman who wears all green on the subway in NY. Maybe I need to get checked out…