PS Vita Portable Charger MOD

So I bought this "PS VITA PORTABLE CHARGER" from a shop in discount, it seemed a good deal because its a Power Bank with 5A and was a lot cheaper than most power banks.

First thing I did was to see if it had any power, it did...But the LED was RED so it was in his last charge... So I ordered a PSVita Usb cable and tried to charge it up... what? It's blinking really fast, and I tested with every usb charge I had at home. This lead me to think that SONY had once again some proprietary crap inside. 

Note: I already had tried to short the data pin as suggest by some websites, but, spoiler alert, the reason it was blinking was because the cheap usb cable i have was not powering enough current so it would start blinking.

So let's have a look inside:

This thing, has a hidden screw beneath and it was freaking hard to open it, probably had glue around!! 

Oh hello there, we have "Arduino" micro controller inside!! It's a Atmel Mega 8535L.

I looked at some datasheets online and I could probably read it's serial ports, but I dont have the tools to make a proper connection to those tiny pins. 

The reason theres a micro-controller inside is probably to measure the temperatures on the batteries (forgot to take pictures of that, it's on the back side of these images), to prevent overcharge and to measure the input current.

Back on trying to make this thing to charge I started to find some test pins that I could solder some wires (to stop using that damn cable) and here I found two contacts next to each other! The Red arrow is Positive 5V and the Black arrow is GND.

Let's test this, I grab my old PSP charger, thats 5V 2A, thats enough for this thing that needs 5V 1A. Blink, Blink, Blink, Blink, (please don't start blinking fast!!!).... YES it's charging!!!

After the successful test I soldered some wires in there to make the pins accessible from outside

Voilà, here's the finished product, I still need to connect a cable to short the data pins so it begins charging (I could short those 2 pins on the right, which I think are the data pins from my testing, but again my soldering iron is a bit too big).

And that's how you charge your ps vita portable charge without any Sony crap, also is anyone interested in knowing more about that Atmel chip?

ESP8266 Blink when channel goes live on Twitch

Well, our little ESP8266 doesn't really like HTTPs or better SSL, so I had to find a way to know if a channel was live or not using Twitch API.

The solution was to host a simple PHP (that "just" works, sorry i dont know PHP) that prints 1 or 0 according to the status of a channel.

https://gist.github.com/dicamarques14/41a45c1cef073683eea6

There you have the Arduino IDE Program and the php file, just change your ssid, your host url and the pins if needed (it uses 2 LEDs, in gpio 2 an 4).

Also dont forget about the ChannelList, just follow the examples I left there, max number of channels is 50 (that should be enough :P).

CM octane Keyboard LED Mod - Ambient Light Demo

Here's a demo of how it works the ambient light mode

Cooler Master Octane Keyboard MOD

About a year ago I got this keyboard, it's pretty nice but I was limited to 7 colors and a mode where it would slowly change between colors.

So I got it open and guess what, the LED strip just connects to the pcb, just unplug it and tried to connect it to my arduino.

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The connector on the right is the one that plugs in to the RGB Strip:
Black - +5V
Red - GND for Red LED
Green - GND for Green LED
Blue - GND for Blue LED

While I had my keyboard open I also removed the plastic covers on the sides so the light could shine from the sides and the cable could come out too.

More interior images here: http://adrenaline.uol.com.br/forum/threads/review-teclado-cm-storm-octane.549264/

Here are the schematics, the LEDs are only there to simbolize where you would plug the wires in.

Just use a NPN transistor, I used a BC547, and a 330ohm resistor between the transistor and the Arduino pins.

The arduino code is this one:

https://gist.github.com/dicamarques14/631f7c0e0ff6dbec17fe

Processing test code, you can use this to test the communication between your arduino and pc:

https://gist.github.com/dicamarques14/0d79d9a12f2dfd7443ab

And heres a java program, I slightly modified it to work with this sketch:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By1jBXUOP24eSndBTU15ZFJ4dUE/view?usp=sharing

Source in github https://github.com/dicamarques14/wallaceRGB/

You can also follow this guide: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-RGB-LED-Music-Lights/

Just dont forget to change the pin numbers :)

Here's a video of the first test: