The Blob That Wouldnt Die.

[This was originally posted on blogagotchi.com --ed.]

Well that was a stupid idea.



I'd expected some sort of chemical reaction, melting biohazardous
glowing waste. But was greeted with a nice clean blob of black epoxy
instead. Turns out it had a big "A" written on it in marker. I did a
little intar-searching and discovered that what I was trying to do was
known as "unpotting", and that one should use heat and a cutting tool
of some sort. Good thing I have a decrepit soldering iron laying
around. (BTW, dont use sandpaper on soldering nibs, it makes the
copper insides of the nib alloy with the solder.) I used the
moderately sharp edge of it to scrape a little at the offending blob.
Turns out heat turns epoxy into taffy. I'd like to just put the thing
into my oven and then scrape the junk off, but that's obviously not
gonna happen. I'm gonna need something a little more focused. I also
dont wanna go scraping away at it for fear of destroying the sensitive
little chips, or, more importantly, the traces on the board. You cant
imagine trying to fix those things. *shudder*



I'm also going to take one of those usb microscopes off the hands of a
certain geek friend of mine, to assist the examination, not to mention
some assorted hardware I'm gonna pick up Thursday.



In other news, I've discovered why I like virtual pets, and why my mom wouldnt let me have pets. (excuse the lack of gamma.)









Turns out if you yank the battery, it clears the time, but not the date. So, my tama, named "Hack" btw,

was sleeping at around 3:00pm, and it dawned on me, and I changed the
time, and it woke up and that's what I saw. Oh, how I laughed. (and
no, that's not a gigantic scratch/crack on the window.)



Next up on Tamahack? Direct LED leads, so I dont have to figure out what wavelength the LEDs operate on :D

TAMAHACK GO! :D

[This was originally posted on blogagotchi.com --ed.]

So I finally got my much awaited tama after a few days of worry. I
made the mistake of using Google checkout when I ordered my tamagotchis
from toys r us online. Unfortunately one was backordered (just HAD to
get the glow in the dark one...) but the other (a black lightning style)
came in today. I wasted no time in yanking its little tab out and
started playing with it. I was struck by the lack of a "Sleep"
command, since my digimon, and most of my other pets for that matter
have a "sleep" function.



I decided to test my IR thing, but it wouldnt pick up the signal for
some reason. Dont know why, could be something to do with the
transmitter, but who knows. Perhaps it's on a different spectrum
range? Perhaps I could solder on some tabs to clip some test leads to,
and feed that directly into my Universal Breadboard, and then into my
sound card.



I popped it open and noticed that the antenna is just plastic. Not
that I was expecting any high-tech RF modulation, but then again, I
expected _some_ use.







I notice two jumper pads, much like the "DEBUG" pad. They're labeled
JP1 and JP2, while DEBUG is labeled JP3. Curious. They are neighbor
pins. Curiouser and Curiouser. Perhaps a serial terminal?







I must say that the screws holding the board were _very_ tight, and I almost stripped one or two in the process :X



I started verrry gently started prying the board off its mounts and
thought I had moved the lcd. This, of course, made me wet myself,
thinking I had just pwn3d my own, new, tamagotchi. so I quickly
stitched it up and put the battery back in. I pwn3d it. I screamed, I
swore, I woke my parents. It looked like I could only see the bottom 3
rows of pixels. "Poop." So I turned it over and popped out the lens,
and rested the board in the back half of the case, and put the battery
in. It worked, but the lcd looked different. I poked it. It changed.
Of course! It needed pressure on the connectors to the lcd!



And so here I sit, staring at the lcd, not wanting to pop it off for
fear of never getting it back on again. Oh, wait, there it goes.
*crash* And there went my screwdrivers...and the screws >_<







Hmmm, it's one of those black epoxy blobs again! After talking to an
electrical hobbyist friend of mine, I am now informed that I should use
rubbing alcohol to remove it, and not to let it run at all, lest it
melt through the board.



The LCD interface is definitely interesting, the bottom 12 pins on the
left hand side of the lcd go through the board, around to the other
side, and back to the processor. Very smart! This let them route the
traces around the buttons, without having to actually route around em!
The whole thing is 40 pads to a side, for a total of 80
pads/traces/whatever, most are I/O pins straight from the processor,
but some are power/ground.



I have a horrible feeling that they will have simply glued the
processor and ram onto the board, rather than soldering it, but I dont
know yet. On second thought, it's probably a single integrated chip,
since the AVR and TI MSP430 chips all have onboard ram and flash rom.



BTW, all you intrepid tamahackers, dont take off the LCD. It's a royal
pain to put back on. (If you dont take the wimpy way out and just drop
it back into the plastic case) And the bubble of glass on the edge of
the lcd goes towards the top of the tama. Look for the label "SW3",
notice the trace above that, and the trace above that. That's where
the bottom edge should be.







Use a VERY soft cloth to remove any fingerprints on the lcd/lens assembly.



Also, you need to tighten the pcb board rather tightly for the lcd to
connect properly, at least to just before the point where the
screwdriver begins to slip.



Truly amazing, I managed to completely disassemble (Short of
de-soldering it) and reassemble the tama and it survived. I am now
more confident in my Hacking abilities :P



See you next entry, when I Destroy the Blob!



Look at my Flickrstream!



http://www.flickr.com/photos/grycueusp/

Gotta hate backorders, Gotta dislike Radioshack's prices, Gotta love Free Software.

[This was originally posted on blogagotchi.com --ed.]

Well at least one of my Tamagotchis is on its' way.



A couple days ago I decided I'd go pick up a couple Tamas from my local
Wal*Mart(r)(c)(tm) but apparently they only carry "Littlest Petshop"
junk. So I cursed and swore and punted children that had wandered into
my path, and stormed out of wallyworld.



I like not having hanging debt, so I do my intarweb commerce via a
pre-paid credit card, so I walked into my local CVS and bought a
"Reload" card which lets me put whatever money I hand the cashier on my
card minus $4.95. So, I reloaded my card and hopped online.



I checked amazon, and their prices were reasonable, except for the
"Black Stripes" v.4 tama, which I wanted more than "Pink Hearts 'n'
Fluffy Bunnies", being a manly man and all. So I figured, "Heck, I can
get em at Toys Я Us." So I hopped on their website and found they had
average prices for all their tamagotchis.



And then I was torn. I saw the translucent white'n'blue tama and
wanted it. I saw the glow-in-the-dark tama and wanted it. I couldnt
decide which hackneyed make-it-this-and-the-kiddies-will-buy-it gimmick
I wanted more. After asking all my friends and collegues and getting a
resounding "Why are you buying Tamagotchi's?", one pulled through and
told me to forget the translucent one. And I decided that I didnt
really want the translucent one after all. With my decision made, I
went to click "Buy Now!" and was slightly surprised when my cursor
didnt change to a little pointy-finger hand icon. It took me a second
to realize that maybe I should actually read the text on the button.
"Temporarily not available online."



So I waited till the next day and it miraculously appeared available
again! I ordered with apprehension in my breath, and was informed the
next day, much to my chagrin, that the Glow in the dark Tamagotchi was
back ordered.



So here I wait, waiting on my one tama to arrive at my
door, all lonely like, while it's sibling is on its way from the
factory to the warehouse to my house. The first should be here in a
week, the second in two, most likely. Hopefully they dont charge me
twice for shipping, as that would suck immensely.



In other news, I picked up the components I needed to make the stereo
IR transciever I needed to start prodding the IR communications:

2x IR led detector/emitter pair: $3.29/pkg

2x 1/8in stereo phono plug : $3.99/pkg



Which of course, equals "too much", but the other alternative would be
to request samples from assorted manufacturers, but that would take
weeks for them to actually get here.



I will post a schematic soon, for those of you who cant figure it out
from here, the hard part is actually packaging the darned thing...



Last but not least, I have found some neat software called Geda, which
is a Free and Open Source software package that is great for hobbyist
electronicists such as myself. Quite a bit less confusing as the other
packages available. Btw, if you're not using linux already, go
download Ubuntu from ubuntu.com

Hello True Believer!

[This was originally posted on blogagotchi.com --ed.]

As is customary, my first post here on Blogagotchi will be an introductory one.
My name is Gryc, and I am currently a college student majoring in Computer Information Systems. In this blog I'm going to document (as much as possible) the Tamagotchi v.4 (and v.4.5 should any non-firmware changes be made). I'm an open source advocate, and as such, all my code and so on will be all Free and Open Source, with my source code licensed under the GPLv2 and all other content licensed under the "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike" license.
I also plan to keep abreast with whatever new versions are released as well. Hopefully we can discover some even more fun things to do with our Tamagotchis!
By the way, I encourage everyone to pick up a Tamagotchi at your local toy shop or online. Heck pick up two and make them talk to each other! They're social creatures anyway :D
Also, since my personal Tamagotchis will most likely be reset every day or so, I probably wont keep a tamalog on this blog.