bored: acquired Tremor Pak Plus for N64 i've had for over a decade, turns out i got a new in package unit from 1998... it even smells like the late 90s.
opened it up, the CR2032 used to create NVRAM in the controller pak(along with a Cypress cy62256vll-70snc SRAM module) was down to 1.5 volts, so i ordered a pack of batteries.... not sure why i'll need 20 CR2032 batteries, but they seemed cheap enough. those little SRAM units only draw .1uA when in standby mode... considering most CR2032s are rated around 200mA-h these days, assuming this one was, it should have lasted around 2 million hours in standby. that's over 228 years, by the way. so i'd say draw isn't an issue with them so much as the lithium battery itself just won't last that long.
what i was going to do was modify the controller pak slightly so that whenever the pak was in use, it would draw a small amount of power from the controller to charge a capacitor and use that in addition to the CR2032. but after seeing what these calculated out to drawing, i'm not going to bother since i'll probably get something like 10 years out of this new cell before it fails.
so, being dissatisfied about not modifying something, i looked toward the rumble function. this has a high/low switch on it to change what voltage the vibration motor is driven at, at 3.34 volts, it ends up at .170 amps. looked online and it seems people like to modify them to have the vibration motor draw from the controller port so that they don't need to swap in AA batteries. i decided i want to drop the current down to .125 amps, so i'm just going to put a resistor inline with it on high, which will also drop the low setting(since it looks to run through another resistor) current draw.
not being satisifed with simply copying what others are doing(see a pattern yet?
), i decided i'm going to go a step further and fill the now useless battery area with capacitors. reason being, this will offset the lag that will happen to the vibration motor's spool-up time due to lower voltage since the capacitors will charge up to 3.3 volts when the vibration motor is off and when it kicks on it will delay the drop down to a calculated 2.48 volts the resistor will cause the motor to run at, hopefully enough to where it won't be perceivable. it will also be a lot less strain on the regulation system inside the console itself.
of course, all of this is what i consider a "light" project.
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