Catgenie Sanisolution Hack

The project This project follows on from the excellent work by ScotSEA and his Arduino reset program (see ). I had never taken my Catgenie apart as Scott did, but had built a small contact board instead. I had previous updated Scott's program to so that it output some debugging output to the computer during the reset, as the process had never been very smooth. Today I got round to testing some more permanent solutions. I tried: - Making the Arduino pretend to be a cartridge. This didn't work for some reason - the controller never seems to receive any I2C commands from the Catgenie. - Replacing the cartridge with a 24LC00 EEPROM.

Fsx H36 Dimona [rutracker.org] more. While I could read from and write to the chip using the Arduino, the Catgenie didn't like it. The solution I ended up with is a modified SaniSolution cartridge that contains an Arduino, some indicator LEDs and a button to reset the cartridge. It is powered by the Catgenie and so is fully self contained.

Nov 06, 2008 CatGenie hacking. And they leave out certain aspects like the sanisolution. Hack done for one of the original catgenie cartridges.

Required materials You will need: - An Arduino board. I am using the Duemilanove, but the newer Uno or one of the smaller cheaper boards should be fine - 2 x LEDs (eg. One red, one green) - 1 x press switch/button - 1 x 10k resistor - A small piece of stripboard to wire up the LEDs and button - Some terminal pins - A soldering iron and solder - Some thin wire (I used some un-twisted Cat-5) - A very small drill bit (I used 1.0mm), and a drill. Overview The Catgenie communicates with the chip on the cartridge through the exposed contacts.

For the more technical minded, the Catgenie acts as an I2C bus master (providing a clock signal), and the cartridge acts as a slave. We will add our Arduino as a second slave on that same bus. To facilitate this, we will solder some wires to the contacts, and feed these inside the cartridge to be connected to our circuit. Drilling holes It may help to remove the cartridge label as shown in the picture above. There are four I/O connections on the cartridge, each exposed through two of the connector terminals.

Tinymce Wysiwyg Editor Joomla Download Templates here. Counting from the top: Terminal Usage 1 and 2 +5V 3 No connection 4 and 5 Ground 6 No connection 7 and 8 SCL (the I2C Clock line) 9 No connection 10 and 11 SDA (the I2C Data line) Drill 4 holes in the plastic part of the cartridge (be careful not to drill the circuit board), between terminals 1/2, 4/5, 7/8 and 10/11. Connecting the wires Find two piece of twisted-pair cable and strip a few millimetres of insulator from the ends.

Push the stripped conductors of one pair through the top two holes, from the inside side of the cartridge. Do the same with the second pair and the bottom two holes. Lay the conductors flat on the terminals, and then solder them to the terminals, as shown in the pictures.

Hopefully you can do better than my child-like attempt at soldering! Make a note Write down the colours of the wires that you soldered to each connector - you'll need this later in the process. Now we can take the cartridge apart. Use a small screw driver to loosen the catches on the side of the cartridge, and prise it apart carefully. Before we install any electronics into the cartridge, we will drill some holes and fit the indicator LEDs and button. This will depend on the size of your LEDs and button.