Nintendo DS logger?

Post by **antus** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:15 pm

Have been thinking about creating some kind of black box logging device, and after talking to my mate yesterday who is looking for a project to write for nintendo DS, i realised that this would be a awesome platform. You could have it on your dash, providing guage views as you drive along and with the touch screen you could tap the screen to signal it to display the next dash layout or whatever. Rough discussion of this has pointed to this being a workable option, if we make up some cartidges with a pic processors that tells the DS its a game, and has bootloader to init an SDcard interface, and load the app from there. The cart would also need the uart. If the main storage was sdcard you could drop 2 or 4 gb in there and log full time so that when something happens to your car, you were allready logging at the time. Comments?

Post by **delcowizzid** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:31 pm

sweet idea i reckon might have to find me a cheap DS if this happens.

Post by **Jayme** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 1:26 pm

that sounds neat. what about something similar on a windows mobile platform? maybe a serial > bluetooth adapter and a quick .net app?

anomaly · Post by **anomaly** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 1:53 pm

Heyas,
(I'm the one Antus mentioned who's keen to start a non-frivolous DS hw/sw project)

There are a couple choices on how to implement this. I'm not sure if you're all aware of how a DS is set up, but basically it has two cartridge slots, one uses a serial interface (slot1, new DS cartridges use this) and the other is parallel (slot2, older GBA cartridges use this). Probably the most ideal/practical would be to have a single standalone cartridge that you plug in to your vanilla DS and away you go. However due to a few of the DS's design aspects there's more to consider here...

The slot 1 is tiny. Very tiny, and thin. You probably wouldn't be able to do much in the way of homebrew hardware here without a large easily-broken extension from the slot, or a breakout box + cable coming from the slot. It also requires more in the way of trickery to fool the DS to run code as it's required to be signed. While this is doable and has indeed been done before in homebrew flashcarts, it would probably add quite a bit to the workload of getting this project off the ground to do this ourselves.

The slot 2 is a lot more robust, and gives a lot more room. It has address lines that map to the ds's memory pool and would make the software side of things a lot simpler to implement. The problem here however is, to have a standalone solution, the DS would need to run in GBA emulation mode, which limits functionality/access to the rest of the DS hardware and does funny things with timings. It is however doable.

Either of these 2 options would require us to provide, at a minimum: a pic, some flash, SD controller, and UART

A third option, if we give up the idea of standalone solution, is to use a 3rd party homebrew flashcart in slot1 that lets us run our code from SD, and have our ecu interface in a slot2 cartridge. Most of these slot1 devices have an SD slot, and are able to prep a slot2 device for access without going in to GBA emulation mode (used for the 3in1 'ezflash' expansion cartridge that enables extra memory, rumble, and sram for gba saves). This would pretty much cut out the flash, SD controller, and pic requirement from the project as we would no longer have to get our cartridge to simulate a game cart or store firmware or have it's own sd controller for logging. The downsides here though are that everyone would be required to obtain one of these on their own and there would be no guarantee brand XYZ's cartridge would behave the same and brand ABC's when running our code. Although they've gotten good recently at using common interfaces for things like mass storage access (called DIDI), their respective softwares are usually in a high state of flux and do things very differently from each other when initializing and chainloading code/apps/roms. Generally speaking though they should be alright.

Personally I'd prefer option 3 as it has the fastest development time and least complexity. What do you guys think? Would the requirement of a homebrew flashcart be a blocker for anyone?

anomaly · Post by **anomaly** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:04 pm

Re: windows mobile platform,
Also very do-able. Most of the older-ish pocketpcs have compact flash interfaces that are very well defined and easy to use. I'd be happy to help on such a project as well, however the point of the discussion I had with Antus previously was to do a DS project as I'm pretty much over windows mobile's lack of reliability now

As for using the device's serial or bluetooth instead of compact flash, I'm not sure you'd be able to get it to use the required ECU's whacky serial timings without blowing away the firmware and doing non-portable trickery to the hardware.. With bluetooth especially. Also the usb ports on *most* of these are client-only and incapable of host mode, so it would also require some winCE driver voodoo to get a client mode chipset talking to another client mode chipset, which is possible with some chipsets but isn't something that's very common yet afaik.

Post by **antus** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:07 pm

Whats the typical cost of a homebrew flash cart in $au? Option 3 sounds the easyest and tidyest. Do these machines have usb ports? If so we could add an FTDI usb->serial adater there (as they are confirmed good with 8192 baud) and that would probably do it.

Post by **antus** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:12 pm

Im told they dont have USB. Oh well. VL400, if we specced out a hardware design do you think you would be able to check it over and make it a reality if we went ahead?

anomaly · Post by **anomaly** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:21 pm

No USB port as standard, although I have heard of home made slot2 projects to add them.. and it is something I had considered doing previously. What do you think would be easier? ionterfacing to a usb host controller? or directly to a uart? I think the software for a host controller would be more complex but there are lots of real world examples to borrow from.. software for uarts though is something people have been doing since day 1.

Cost for the homebrew flashcarts is about $30aud from bamboogaming.cn (I use and recommend the AceKard2)

http://www.bamboogaming.cn/shop.php/fla ... p_128.html

anomaly · Post by **anomaly** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:21 pm

*interfacing

Post by **Jayme** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 2:34 pm

I reckon option 3. If I were to go out and buy a DS i'd buy a homebrew cart anyway as I am a stingy pirate

Nintendo DS logger?

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