The console wars have begun! Ben compares the inner workings of the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 by tearing them down to their chips and highlighting the electronics design considerations, in case you want to make your own portable version...
Ben Heck’s console wars: PlayStation 1 vs. Nintendo 64
The console wars have begun! Ben compares the inner workings of the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 by tearing them down to their chips and highlighting the electronics design considerations, in case you want to make your own portable version...
Have you ever wondered how The Ben Heck Show team tackles your suggestions and problems? Why use perfboard instead of a manufactured PCB or a breadboard? Is a 3D printer the best way to go, or should you use a CNC mill ? Which is better, CNC or a...
While Ben is away, Felix and Karen will play... the guitar! Karen uses lasers for the electronic housing while Felix prototypes the microcontroller, audio codec and LCD display to embed in an acoustic guitar. It takes a bit of modding, cutting and...
Watch Ben as he tackles the challenge of soldering the main processing chips of an Atari 2600 into a new configuration. In this episode, he'll Introduce concepts and tricks such as the optimal layout of wiring between chips, what to do with dry jo...
Karen, Ben and Felix are back, this time with a supersize Game Boy. To do this, they needed a vinyl cutter for the decals, a CNC router for the huge case and a 3D printer to ensure the switches were in place. The best part is that the smarts behi...
Thanks to a request from the element14 community, Ben chooses a DE0-Nano softcore microprocessor (FPGA) and gives us a tutorial on the basics of low-level digital programming, helping us to see that it's not as scary as it may sound. In particula...
If you need to troubleshoot or design electronic hardware, an oscilloscope is a useful bit of kit. This week Ben and Felix put together a Raspberry Pi-based Bitscope Micro Oscilloscope with a 7-inch touchscreen. Using Autodesk Fusion 360 to desig...
The Ben Heck Show team were asked to check out Valve's Steam Controller, so we took this as an opportunity to see how the controller works and bring PC gaming to the console masses. The team uses it as inspiration to create a gaming controller fo...
When we left Ben three weeks ago, he encountered a problem with the open-source Novena laptop build. Now, watch how Felix and Ben circumvent the need for a breakout board now that the time has finally come to put together the do-it-yourself Noven...
Ben goes beyond retro gaming machines with the "Atari Video Music," uncovering customized microchips, replacing aged parts and braving the hazards of ungrounded metal. Can Ben repair this once groovy analogue music visualizer or is it going to be...