Hackinformer Your device needs to transform, we are here to inform
There’s been a lot of buzz recently around YifanLu’s Indiegogo page attempting to raise money. The money raised would go towards creating purchasable adapters for the 3G model of Vita.
The adapter in question would let you put a microSD card inside your Vita. This means you could be walking around with up to 2TB of space on your Vita (when those large sd kind of cards are available). At the time of this writing, YifanLu reached his goal and has been funded even an extra 30% (great job YifanLu!). I know Hackinformer personal donated to this too as every dollar counts for such a great cause.
So, why is any of this relevant? Well, it seems that over on GBATemp, a user saw what YifanLu did and was simply inspired. YifanLu has his “eagle” open source files that lets the Vita understand the USB/MicroSD pinout and other infrastructural aspects. So with this in mind, handy dev ZexceilXario downloaded the open source files and went to town on his own Vita to see if he could do something similar.
If the pictures are any indicator, you may be able to tell that the crafty guy installed a full fledged USB port to be flush with the surface of the bottom of the Vita (more pictures below). He recounts his experiences with the endeavor; ‘After I saw Yifan lu’s amazing work on the MPCI-E SD adapter, I downloaded the Eagle files and got the pin out for the PS Vita MPCI-E slot, from there I looked at the PS Vita GSM modem and realized the USB pins was all cut off from the PCB with two solder points, after this I did some work and added a USB port using some pins because I couldn’t find an actual USB female xD’
A little while later, he made a revelation, ‘So afterward, yifan lu made me realize the most basic thing I missed (don’t solder to the modem solder directly to mb) I fixed my error here are the pictures of the fix and the results.’
As he reached the end of the whole process, it looked gorgeous. However, there is one major hangup about the whole thing. I…noticed that the PS Vita at some point (very early in me doing this) reacted to the USB and displayed a message “This device is not supported”(probably cause I didn’t bother formatting to exFAT at that point) And the worst part of all has to come from the dev’s mouth directly, ‘Until a driver/plugin that supports this USB connection and mounting is created this is useless.’
I think the wonderful thing about all of this is that he set out to do something and accomplished it. The only issue with it was something that he couldn’t control, but if anybody ever makes a driver for the USB connection, then his mod will work straight away I guess. I could see all kinds of things hooking up to it like a 3rd party controller just like Android and otg cable. The possibilities are endless…
I would tell any of you that are thinking about doing something like this to go for it and you better have a spare Vita but this is how continued support in the scene keeps growing!
Follow ZexceilXario on Twitter by clicking here.
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The wifi model Vita’s, at least the 1000 series has empty MPCI-E contacts. Do you think the contacts are fully functional and can do this mod?