More progress

Alright, I had some significant progress since my last post so here's an update.

I wired up my audio adapter and video wires up to the N64's built in a/v connector and notched the board to make room for the wires to come through. 

I had an interesting predicament trying to test the a/v connection. I don't have any devices that have the standard RCA female plugs on them... I ended up hooking my Dreamcast to an old a/v switcher, my video cable to the output of the switcher, then the factory a/v N64 cable directly to the tv. I got a bad shot of it plugged up, but I couldn't get one of the tv and all the wiring and, quite frankly it's not that important, save that it worked. I tested the audio by hooking the 3.5mm jack to my phone and it seems to work perfectly as well.

I had to make some room for the power cable to go to the raspi so i figured,  may as well look into extending the usb ports. It took soome effort to actually get the port detached; they really had it put on there well, but I managed. Here is a shot of the usb port wired up to act remotely. I haven't decided if I am going to put another hub in to access from the outside of the console yet, so I may stick this through one of the sides and just go with it. The original pans I drew up involved taking a 4-port USB hub and relocating the portss to stick through the ram expansion door, but I am having a terrible time trying to find that little thing locally...  but that is another adventure for another day. 

A closer shot of the USB wiring. You may notice I only have 2 of the wires on the Raspi's cable hooked up, USB uses 4 wires by default for those who don't already know. The ones I have wired up are the power ones only (+5v and ground) while the other 2 (data 1 & 2) have been snipped off. I did this to avoid any weird data redundancies. For instance, the raspi trying to talk to it's power port from it's usb port through the hub here. I don't think the data pins on the Pi's power port are connected, but I would rather snip a few wires than ruin the entre system; better safe than broken.

I saw a cool pcture online of the Pi as compared to a gift card and I think it is close enough that I can ballpark what my layout may end up looking like. So I grabbed Mr. Sharpie and an old giftcard, referenced the FAQ page of raspberrypi.org, and I have a "close enough" mock board. Here is an approximation of where it will end up inside the N64. I won't do any cutting till I have a board in hand though. 

MY SD SOCKETS CAME IN!!!!!!

I feel it worth mentioning that I got these from Newark/element14, and it was an altogether pleasent experience. No they aren't paying me to say that, it was just such a great buying experience that I feel it worth remarking about.

So time to break out that crappy perf-board I bought a few weeks ago and finish some cartridges!  

With the wires attached:

I origially was going to have a seperate game cartridge for each of the SD cards of the system, but Caytee suggested that I have at least one of them be removeable from the outside, so I took her advice and until I get all the  parts in and the kinks worked out, I'll stick with just this one. But once I do have everything functional, I'll hard-wire the other cards in. 

Lining up the socket inside the cartridge:

I stumbled on this SD card at Big lots for $8 so I picked one up lol. Here are a few shots of the finished (for now) cartridge. I am a little sad it still says Madden, but I'm gonna have soome spiffy logos made up for each of the distros' logos. This one is going to end up being Raspbian, the official Debian distro for the Pi, but thats another blog entirely and, frankly, there are enough resources that are well more qualified than myself who detail the distros in detal. At best, I'll find some and link them here when I get to it. 

The SD card installed top view:

And front view:

That's all for now! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Tons more to come soon, stay tuned! Too many exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!11!!one!!!!