Thursday, September 7, 2006

JuiceBox Modding

Well I got one of these off ebay.

Just for fun really, it plays 128kbit mp3s but nothing more (I think later models do more?). I might give it to parents for xmas or something loaded with a couple of albums.

Also makes for a nice (well not really, the display is really crappy) digital pictureframe if you're into stuff like that.


My order of 5 SD sockets arrived and I was bored. Found a piece of mylar cable that accidentally had the same pin spacing as a juiceware cart that wasn't included and ...


From left to right, piece of an old phonecard to hold the mylar cable in place, the mylar cable, some regular wires, an sd socket and a 32 meg SD card. Perfect

Will make a cleaner SD adapter inside a real juiceware cart later when it arrives from the other end of the world.

UPDATE 09/02


Hooked it up to JTAG and serial :-)


Ran some demos


And since I was stupid enough to destroy the juiceware cart I ordered before dumping it's contents that's about it for now. Would also need the program flash code to do the xD card mod, and that hasn't been released yet.


UPDATE 09/05


Coding, coding. Managed to learn some aspects of this cpu and embedded development as a whole. Managed to set up the LCD in 4096 color mode and modify the example font drawing code that was released on the elinux Wiki to work with the 12bpp framebuffer (not perfectly yet though..) Also managed to set up the serial port for receiving (rx didn't work in the example code) and now I have something running that prints out stuff I send it through the serial port.

2 comments:

  1. I just discovered the Juice Box, a sweet little platform for $4. Are you still doing anything with the thing these days?

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  2. Well, it was closer to $50 when I bought it :) I sold it last year. Ended up coding a dumbo linux kernel bootloader and booted a selfcompiled kernel a few of times but only had a couple of hundred kilobytes of RAM after busybox was up, so it was pretty useless. That was the last thing I did with it IIRC.

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