Hacking DEAD [Shutdown]DragonInjector - Game Cart Payload Injector (Trinket M0 Clone)

[thorasgar]

Just for you:

That thing is totally bad ass!

 

[Mouser X]

Custom colors? If I could have *any* color, I'd want clear, or metalic gold, or metalic silver/chrome. Of those, clear seems the most realistic. Oooh! Or glow-in-the-dark blue. Even with the lights off, you could still find your jig/injector.

Seriously though, I'm fine with gray, or black. Preferably something that doesn't stick out too much from my other Switch game carts. Mouser X over and out.

 

[Zangrief]

Definitely going to be buying one of these, easily the most creative idea I've seen on here. I really hope you do well out of this!

 

[Degga]

i will wait till we can choose from custom colors i want a green one! what ist maroon for a color???

 

[nitrozz]

Main post updated! Finally finished squishing everything down to fit the new dimensions and got the enclosure modeled. New boards on their way, will order the case bits from Shapeways this week.

i want one of this. Please

 

[Nollog]

what ist maroon for a color???

Dark red

 

[isoboy]

Dark red

"Blood moon"

 

[sigboe]

For a stripped screw, I've carefully drilled them out before. All you do is carefully drill with a bit that is a size bias the shaft of the screw. Drill until the head pops, it'll usually stay on the bit once it pops. Then once you get the back plate off there will be enough for you to use a pair of pliers and unscrew the shaft.

Or you can get a screw extractor kit, it has a bit that you drill into the screw and it catches it a certain way which allows you to then put the drill in reverse and back out the screw.

I would need a really small screw extractor kit. What does the size of the screw extractor kit correspond to? The diameter of the head or the rest of the screw? Maybe in a such a small screw, the smallest dremel bit I have would be better.

 

[bundat]

Just for you:

Wow, how did you make this shot?
Do you use some software to create this realistic colored model?
Or did you just use some image editing software like Photoshop?
Or did you actually make a skin colored unit just to make this picture?

 

[MatinatorX]

I

Wow, how did you make this shot?
Do you use some software to create this realistic colored model?
Or did you just use some image editing software like Photoshop?
Or did you actually make a skin colored unit just to make this picture?

I just changed the color in Fusion360 and did a raytrace render with a transparent background, then loaded it into CorelDRAW and put my logo in and some text. Took 10 minutes, which is probably pushing it for a joke

 

[4xposed]

i hope tindie allow shipping to germany for decent shipping price.
all countries that are not Europe we have to pay custom fees in germany from a value of over 26euro including shipping costs we need to pay 19% vat !

let's assume the dragon injector costs 23 euros and shipping 5 euros then the package will land at customs and we have to pay extra 5,32 €. for 1 dragon injector we have to pay total price of
33.32 euros = 49,67CAD to get it to germany!

and after some amount of money you should add import fees on top of that, sadly

 

[azxc]

Wow, this is amazing, thank you for your effort. You will probably end up designing a future modchip or product etc and be making boatloads of money if you can manage and complete a project of this level.

I'm sure you will make some good money selling this finished project also, as i doubt many (if any) people have the 3d printer, soldering skills etc to make this and would rather buy it from you. Maybe you should make your own e-commerce website for it, not sure if tindie takes a commission but i think you'll be getting very little (if any) buyers from tindie traffic alone on a niche project like this so why even pay them commission? it would probably be best for you to skip them all together since all of your buyers will come from the switch modding community and not tindie. If anything, pay a commission to modchip resellers as they will have the audience you are looking for and you'll get a lot more sales. If you need help with a website you can PM me as i am a fullstack web dev and can give you more advice on it. And your also making it open source...major companies and other manufacturers have a lot to learn. (TX)

 

[laramie]

Hey everyone!

I want to share a project I'm currently working on - a payload injector with the form factor of a Switch game cart!

As I seem to always forget to bring my phone, cable, OTG adapter or dongle with me, and I'm not a big fan of AutoRCM, I started thinking - wouldn't it be great if I could just store my jig and dongle inside my Switch? I don't really like the idea of opening my switch and soldering to it for warranty/resale reasons, and my card slot is always empty because, well, we live in the age of digital. Thus, DragonInjector was born.

This project is based on the open source Trinket M0 and has three main goals:

1) Everything must fit inside the dimensions of a standard Nintendo Switch game cart. This includes the RCM Jig.
2) Anything not necessary for the operation of the dongle will be removed for space/power savings. This thing needs to run for weeks on a CR1616. Goodbye LDO, APA-102 LED and always-on power LED! Added the APA-102 and the LDO back after switching the power source to a super capacitor! For all intents and purposes this is now a funny-shaped Trinket M0 and fully compatible with any code written for it.
3) Needs to have a 90's hacker movie name and logo.

I did not want to compromise on usability and convenience, so I deemed the reset button, power switch and status LED as "necessary". The cap for the USB plug will also function as the RCM jig holder. To be clear, this project does NOT allow you to inject your payload through the cart slot. Without heavy modifications to your Switch this is unfortunately impossible. Here's what it DOES let you do:

- Store your payload dongle inside your Switch game cart slot.
- Always have your RCM jig on you as it's stored in the cap.
- Inject your payload with a USB Type C connector so no adapters are needed.
- Charge it up with the card slot or any USB Type C port thanks to the supercap power source. Charging via the card slot means you can even charge it from the Switch while docked!
- Forget it even exists until you need it.
- One screw holds the board in and removing it will give you access to the SWD and SWC pads so you can reprogram it for whatever you like, including non-Switch stuff if you want.

One nice thing I discovered is that the 3.3v in the game card slot turns off when your Switch is off or in sleep mode, meaning the dongle will charge while you're playing but won't sap your battery when you're not. The average battery drain is estimated at half a percent average for every hour the Switch is on, but this should go down as the cap charges so a fully charged dongle will likely pull much less than that. I'll put real world numbers here once testing is done.

Project milestones are as follows:
1) Make schematic/design board with Eagle and Fusion360 DONE.
2) Order parts and PCB's DONE.
3) Model enclosure to have exact dimensions and features of Switch game cart DONE.
4) Soldering, programming and testing of board - Waiting on parts.
5) Print the case on my FDM 3D printer. PETG for board enclosure, FLEX for cap/RCM jig. DONE. Went SLA for the prototype. Prints in the mail!
6) Tweaking. Add cool factor. DONE! I'll let you decide if it looks cool enough.
7) Assembly and testing.

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Once I have a working prototype I'll share the Eagle files, gerbers, models and parts list. For those that aren't familiar, this means you can do pretty much anything you want with the designs as long as you link back to the original licence on my GitHub. If you're not comfortable soldering 0603 resistors by hand, assuming the testing goes well I'll be selling these on tindie for around $23 USD ($30 CAD). I'll also sell the populated PCB without the case if you want to print your own, as well as the RCM jig since it works best with the precision of an SLA or SLS printer and those aren't so common yet.

I had some fun and made up a sort of product poster you can find under the spoiler. It'll show you what it looks like and explain the more important details. I'll do up a second one closer to release with usage instructions and stuff. If people like the poster, I'm toying with the idea of getting some blank cartridge cases and making some nice "retail-looking" cases for them with similar fancy graphics. Leave a comment below if this is something you think you'd like to see, but it definitely won't be part of the first batch.

Thanks to everyone for all the support so far!

Spoiler: Product Poster

View attachment 138547

Looks nice! I'd be willing to buy/make one myself. I'll have to keep this tabbed

 

[P4RI4H]

Man, I hope I'm on the ball enough to order this bad boy when it goes line on tindie... I'll be ordering 2 for sure.

 

[MatinatorX]

Wow, this is amazing, thank you for your effort. You will probably end up designing a future modchip or product etc and be making boatloads of money if you can manage and complete a project of this level.

I'm sure you will make some good money selling this finished project also, as i doubt many (if any) people have the 3d printer, soldering skills etc to make this and would rather buy it from you. Maybe you should make your own e-commerce website for it, not sure if tindie takes a commission but i think you'll be getting very little (if any) buyers from tindie traffic alone on a niche project like this so why even pay them commission? it would probably be best for you to skip them all together since all of your buyers will come from the switch modding community and not tindie. If anything, pay a commission to modchip resellers as they will have the audience you are looking for and you'll get a lot more sales. If you need help with a website you can PM me as i am a fullstack web dev and can give you more advice on it. And your also making it open source...major companies and other manufacturers have a lot to learn. (TX)

Thanks so much for the kind words! I think I've mentioned this before, but this is more about having fun for me and pushing my skills further than it is about making money. Anything I earn from this project will be put towards better equipment and tools to help me make even cooler projects in the future

Tindie honestly takes a pretty small cut and does a lot to make life easier. One of the reasons I'm going with tindie is because it seems to get around electronics certification requirements by positioning products as DIY style kits that you could make yourself (tindie requires open sourcing your projects, although this is not why I did so) and as such places the onus on the customer to research the product and make the decision whether it's suitable for them and whether they trust the design and maker. There are a lot of funny laws and tests required for various kinds of electronic devices, especially in Canada where I live, and I don't want to run into any trouble with the authorities if this thing becomes a runaway success somehow. I've heard from many startups that to even make an attempt at something like CSA certification, you need to plunk down around $50k and hope you pass. If you fail, that'll be another $30k to retry, please. I don't know enough about this stuff to know what certifications I even require, and it seems every place I go to for advice has a different answer. In the event that it does become really successful, I'll go find a business lawyer and figure out exactly what I have to do to sell these myself legally. I get that for mass market stuff, advertising and widespread availability is everything, but for something like DragonInjector which is aimed at a pretty niche audience, word of mouth and taking the burden off of the maker is way more important for a successful product than doing all the usual fancy big business stuff.

It's kind of funny when I about it, actually. You hear all of these stories from Kickstarter projects etc. about startups failing to deliver products and wasting all of their development money on multiple unneeded prototypes and outsourcing everything to other companies and having trouble with every deadline imaginable, but they seem to always have all their paperwork neatly sorted before anyone even opens up Eagle. In my case, I'm doing all of those things myself in my kitchen, which smooths out the process of concept-to-product to a ridiculous degree. The few suppliers I already use and trust were chosen specifically to make it easy for me to scale up from making 50 of something a week to over 1000 no problem at all. All of the techical stuff is pretty comfortable for me, but when it comes to the actual business stuff like paperwork and certifications I've barely got a clue.

When it all comes down to it, I just want to make stuff. I want to improve my skills and be proud of the stuff I create with those skills and then do it again. Maybe some day if my hobby projects go really well, I'll figure out the business end of things and start a real one with an online marketplace and all that fun stuff. For now, though, I'm perfectly happy with a platform like tindie to help me create and share those creations!

...with that said, if you're an interested modchip seller and want to help me with some of those business things I mentioned, send me a PM.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Also, a bit of an update, the version 2 boards came in today! These are the ones I forgot the Type C resistor on as mentioned a few posts back and won't be in any shipping dongles, but it'll give you an idea of what they look like. The boards were manufactured by JLCPCB and look absolutely fantastic. Also, they seem to be the only cheaper manufacturer that will v-score 0.6mm boards which makes my life a heck of a lot easier. They kick the crap out of Seeed and PCBGoGo in both quality and customer service. Highly recommend if you need to order PCBs!

The latest boards shipped out this morning and should be here Tuesday. It'll take me about a day to assemble one and put it through all the needed testing, then I'll get the 10 testers made up and mailed out. Pictures and a demonstration video will follow after testing!

That's the PCB/flash chip from the racing game I disassembled to the left of the first photo. Thanks to the ENIG finish of the boards, the DragonInjector PCBs game cart pad layout looks exactly like those on a real cart. Only 3.3V and GND are used so I didn't really need the other pads, but I think it makes it look much better!

 

[kevandkkim]

will definitely buy this over the Sx Gear announced. Much handier and just a hell of a lot cooler!!! cant wait

 

[Canna]

Dude how did i miss this , your marketing is sweet nice poster..
But i have one problem Weres all the naked chicks ? or Bait haha good work.
Whens my freebie coming anyway

 

[MatinatorX]

Dude how did i miss this , your marketing is sweet nice poster..
But i have one problem Weres all the naked chicks ? or Bait haha good work.
Whens my freebie coming anyway

Thanks buddy! Fusion360 includes raytrace rendering so might as well use it

I'll be releasing the gerbers, models, code and BOM as soon as the prototype is finished and the testers go out. Then you can make one for free yourself

 

[Canna]

Thanks buddy! Fusion360 includes raytrace rendering so might as well use it

I'll be releasing the gerbers, models, code and BOM as soon as the prorotype is finished and the testers go out. Then you can make one for free yourself

Forget all that milarky thats why i have good buds like you that send out sample prototypes :-)
as sexy as it is im not gonna be making this bad boy i dont have the machinery or the 3d printer.

 

[mastermx]

just discovered this. This is perfect. I will buy it asap if it is released. I hope you ship to the UK!