Restoring a Roberts RD-60 Radio

My wife loves her RD60 Roberts DAB Radio, however during our recent house move it was (electrically) broken.

It was also very very tatty - the fake leather covering they used for it was very poor quality, and no joke - just lightly tapping it would cause chunks of fake red leather to fall off!

Time to take it apart and restore it!

Before photos:

First stage was to take it apart and fix the electrical fault, this was easy - the PSU was broken. Now I know I can fix the Radio, time to re-upholster it.

A trip to Dunelm and my wife picked a rather nice red flowery material. I bought a meter at £4. Bargain.

After a strip down before recovering:

And the finished product, re-upholstered, cleaned and fully working!

I still need to do the carry handle, but I don't have a sewing machine, so that will have to wait until I visit my mum.

Home roasted chestnuts the easy way

Gather chestnuts as local wood

1 Make a cut in each chestnut

2 Place in pan of water on the heat. Remove when simmering

3 Pre heat oven to 220c drain water from chestnuts and place on baking tray with. It side up. Wait 15 minutes or longer of the shells have not opened

4 Remove from oven and place in a bowl. Cover with a tea towl for 15 minutes to steam a little.

Serve and enjoy!

SNES RGB Scart Cable Sync Mod

My SNES looks terrible on my new Samsung LED TV :-(

The picture appears to have a checkerboard pattern / interferance:

After reasearch, I have learnt that the usual RGB Scart cables use composite video as the Sync (Pin 9 on SNES to PIN 20 on scart). This creates havoc on modern day TV's, especially on Samsungs.

How to fix it? Use Luma (PIN 7 on SNES) as the Sync.

Heres what I did.

Take your RGB SNES -> Scart Cable.

Carefully cut the moulded cover down one side so you can open it up

Remove the moulded cover to reveal the insides of the plug

Now locate PIN 9 and PIN 7 (On this cable, PIN 9 is the white wire). Carefully cut around the block of plastic, unsolder the white cable and solder it to PIN 7 (Handily the PIN next to PIN 9 :-))

Replace the rubber moulding, super glue the cut, clean it up and job done!

After sync mod, no more interference, checker board pattern :-)

Custom case for the Super Everdrive!

First I started with an old cartridge, took it spat and used white spirit to remove the front and back labels. I gave it a good clean up:

Now lined up the PCB and dremelled out a slot for the SD Card (this photo was before sanding the edges of the slot!)

PCB in and lined up:

Cart bolted to gather and the rather lovely label provided by Retro Towers applied! Job done!

Perfect! Very happy with how this turned out. Composite Video mod next.

Super Everdrive time!

I received the Super Everdrive today, a nice package from RetroTowers in the UK! Even comes with a cart sticker. Ill build the shell later.

First time to install the DSP1 chip.

It needs to go here : Top marks to Krikzz for clearly marking the PCB and orientation for the DSP1

Chip soldered in, simple :-)

Powered up and working a treat. Pilotwings and Mario Kart as they are supposed to be :-)

SNES & Super Everdrive flash cart!

Its my birthday tomorrow, one of the gifts my wife has bought me is a Super Everdrive!

In preparation for tomorrow when I can get my hands on it, I thought id remove a DSP1 chip from a Pilotwings cart.

The DSP1 chip needs to be soldered into the Everdrive PCB to allow you to play DSP1 games such as Mario Cart and Pilotwings - two of my favourite SNES games! (And yours I bet ;-))

This is the chip you need to remove:

Armed with iron and sucker, remove solder:

Remove chip, job done, ready for installation to Everdrive tomorrow!

Hack unsecured DVR's using internet search engines

The internal url for accessing my new DVR is :

http://192.168.1.10/login.rsp

The default user name is admin, with no password.

During the setup wizard, it dosnt prompt you to change user accounts and set passwords, so I assume there may be DVR's out there on the net with no password ready to logon to!

How to find them? Easy, the following google search :

inurl:login.rsp

Will return many, and trust me - many have no password set!

An alternate search is :

intitle:"dvr login"

Try the search in bing as well, both engines return different results.

Enjoy DVR hacking!