DIDJ Hacking

got my didj too! cant wait to see what progress yall make. im going to see if i can set up a serial interface tonight.

Just picked up a deal on ebay 2 didjs for 51.00 shipped...Got one at a flea market this weekend for 5.00 with a charger package and 2 games ,but it had issues. Thats how I found my way here tring to see about fixing it,has a boot issue.will be watching this board closely very eager to learn.

I got my diji and figured out how to mount it like a thumb drive in windows
Then started playing with the graphics sounds and videos.
Now does a rick roll when powered on lol
My Diji hacking page so far
http://wtfmoogle.com/?page_id=741
after seeing what i could do without opening it up I installed a header so the uart is accessible

@ TheMoogle

i tried changing the sound files too. mine kept playing too fast or too slow, did you leave them encoded as .ogg? and if you did, what program did you use to encode them. my attempts have been pretty futile so far.

I haven't gotten mine yet, but I'm daydreaming about adding more buttons/inputs to it. (IIRC it only has 2 buttons and a digital d-pad? can someone confirm?)

I'm wondering if the cartridge slot has GPIO pins or if not, it seems like hooking a few buttons up to GPIO pins on the microcontroller that goes in the cartridge slot wouldn't be a big deal, then you're a case-mod and serial access away from buttons like select/start/x/y/l/r... ? Maybe an analog thumb stick...

Just thinking.

@ TheMoogle

i tried changing the sound files too. mine kept playing too fast or too slow, did you leave them encoded as .ogg? and if you did, what program did you use to encode them. my attempts have been pretty futile so far.

I used audacity to transform some wave files to .ogg
Though most likely you will access the uart and remove the startup app
once you have access to the prompt all you need to do is use oss to play a wave file if you want

I haven't gotten mine yet, but I'm daydreaming about adding more buttons/inputs to it. (IIRC it only has 2 buttons and a digital d-pad? can someone confirm?)

I'm wondering if the cartridge slot has GPIO pins or if not, it seems like hooking a few buttons up to GPIO pins on the microcontroller that goes in the cartridge slot wouldn't be a big deal, then you're a case-mod and serial access away from buttons like select/start/x/y/l/r... ? Maybe an analog thumb stick...

Just thinking.

The sound chip used in the diji is controlled by I2C so you can easily add a expander to it if you can find the proper traces or pins on the chip to solder to

Sounds like a plan.

Just curious, are there any other sub-devices in the didj that use i2c on that same bus (the one the sound chip is on)? (are there other i2c busses in the didj?) ... and finally, how do you know all this? Is there a resource link/schematic somewhere that I missed?

I haven't gotten mine yet, but I'm daydreaming about adding more buttons/inputs to it. (IIRC it only has 2 buttons and a digital d-pad? can someone confirm?)

I'm wondering if the cartridge slot has GPIO pins or if not, it seems like hooking a few buttons up to GPIO pins on the microcontroller that goes in the cartridge slot wouldn't be a big deal, then you're a case-mod and serial access away from buttons like select/start/x/y/l/r... ? Maybe an analog thumb stick...

Just thinking.

I'll do the opposite of confirm, it has two shoulder buttons, (L/R), a d-pad, a and b buttons, two buttons over the D-pad, and one extra button over the a/b buttons.

My two didj's arrived last week from woot. Just before the monster 2Ft snowstorm !! They are pretty nice. We uploaded the free game and were impressed at how well it has been executed. I did have trouble loading their application on Vista so my trusty old XP machine saved the day.

I have the gerbers for the cartridge from Claude. But there is an offset in the gerber origin that batch pcb does not like. I used to have a gerber editor in my old job... but not any more. So I will have the layout guy at work open the altium container, re-generate the gerbers with a ,0,0 origin, and add the board outline to the top layer.

So it will take another few days to get the board into batch pcb.

Got my Didj yesterday, built a break out board with a dremel and some copper clad board, pretty ugly, but I hooked up a FT232RL board to it, and the serial part works fine, am going to try booting from the UART next, this is my first time hacking something, mostly just build stuff, this is pretty exciting.