I'm working frantically right now to put together all the details for a little PulsewaveSF soiree at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire - besides the usual performances and hands-on demos of chip gear, we're setting up a diy table where I'll be most of the day, teaching basic gameboy modding. Check out those links for the address and times, and swing on by - it's on October 16th in Oakland, CA.

About a year ago I built an Arduinoboy Mini, as more or less as originally designed by trash80, based on the instructions he provided here:

http://8bc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=167545#p167545

It has served me exceedingly well, providing copious amounts of MIDI data to my Gameboy's inputs on a daily basis while being rough-housed on the road - until the game boy link cable that I used (some 3rd party knockoff) finally took a dump right before a show last week.

The godawful things have six tiny little crimp pins that have a nasty habit of both allowing their wires to escape, and of falling out of the plastic housing. A major known issue with creating Arduinoboys is that many link cables lack a pin to carry 5V power from the gameboy into the Arduino, requiring an extra power supply. It is possible to move the wires around, but it's fiddly and often results in destroying a pin, making the cable useless.

You can see the issue here, I'm sure.

Having diagnosed the problem, I think I'm going to cannibalize this whole unit and rehouse the perfectly functioning guts in a different case with a new, better cable. It will be shipped off with the green Gameboy featured in my last post. I'll need to build a new arduinoboy soon for stage use, but I've got a bit before that will become absolutely necessary.