The LEGO firm has a protracted historical past of releasing kits which can be fashions of different merchandise and so they are typically fairly fashionable, as they entice followers of each these merchandise and of LEGO on the whole. However most of them are non-functional, within the sense that they don’t work just like the merchandise they’re impressed by. The Pixar Luxo Jr. lamp, for instance, doesn’t truly gentle up and is solely ornamental. Natalie the Nerd was dissatisfied to be taught that the brand new LEGO Sport Boy was equally inert, so she went about changing it into a useful console that’s truly playable.
Natalie is an professional on every thing Sport Boy. She sells an entire catalog of components for modding numerous Sport Boy fashions, gives restore companies, hosts numerous helpful reference documentation on her wiki, and performs every kind of enjoyable conversions of her personal. Earlier this yr, as an example, her clear Sport Boy Shade — full with clear PCB — received numerous consideration within the Sport Boy modding neighborhood.
This undertaking is Natalie’s finest work but. She took the LEGO Sport Boy set, which is simply alleged to be lifeless pile of bricks within the form of the console, and made it useful. Much more spectacular, she did most of that work earlier than she even received her fingers on one of many units.
Natalie received began when she noticed LEGO Japan’s tweet in regards to the launch of the Sport Boy set. Instantly, she noticed the chance and commenced designing. She didn’t have any actual dimensional info to base her design on and so used the display screen inserts as references for measurement.
She knew two issues: that she needed to make use of actual Sport Boy {hardware} and that she’d have to make the mainboard as small as doable to suit. For that purpose, she used a Sport Boy Pocket CPU, which is simple to help and has inner VRAM, eliminating the necessity for exterior VRAM on the PCB. She used her personal Secure Charger board energy provide circuit and different space-saving strategies to provide a mainboard that’s in regards to the measurement of a Sport Boy cartridge. Which means it may possibly match within the area between the cartridge and the display screen on the LEGO Sport Boy.
Round that point, Natalie was capable of snag a LEGO Sport Boy package to place every thing collectively. The one piece left within the puzzle is connecting the LEGO buttons to her mainboard. She ought to have that found out quickly and can publish the undertaking particulars when does.
