I built a switch oled PRO...

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With what seems like an imminent release of the Nintendo Switch two. I've seen a lot of people speculating online about its specs and performance, and it got me thinking we don't even know the true limits of the original Nintendo Switch’s hardware. You guys really seemed to like my Switch Pro video, but some of you guys in the comments raised some really interesting points. After doing a little bit of research, I realized that had I started with a switch OLED, I could’ve push things even further. So today we are going to find the limits of the current gen hardware and create the ultimate Nintendo Switch OLED. Step number one was disassembling the switch, and here we see the first instance of what will be a repeated theme throughout this project, namely that Nintendo doesn't want you doing this and will try to stop you at every turn. The first roadblock was just using their own proprietary security hardware to bolt the switch together. Luckily, my iFixit kit included everything I needed here to get the job done. If you want to get one for yourself, I'll include a link to it, along with all the other tools and materials I've used throughout this project down in the video description. So why is the switch OLED so much better than the launch switch? Well, after the security disaster of the original switch, Nintendo revised their hardware to beef up security, and at the same time, they also quietly upgraded the CPU and GPU. Now, Nintendo being Nintendo, they didn't use this additional horsepower to give us gamers more frames or faster load times, but rather they detuned these new chips in order to deliver better battery life. And that means that there is a lot of hidden potential locked away inside of these newer systems. But before we can unlock it, we have to defeat that newer, upgraded security. And for that, we are going to need a mod chip. Now that we have the switch stripped down to just the motherboard, we are ready to install the mod chip. But I got to warn you guys, this next part is going to be pretty tricky and not for the faint of heart. And in fact, in order to go any further, we're going to need a little bit of technological assistance. That's right. It's time for my new favorite tool, the digital microscope. In order to break into Nintendo's walled garden, we're going to need to connect our mod chip to some very small contacts on the motherboard. But actually, before we can do that, we have to defeat some rather low tech security measures. Nintendo puts these metal covers over their most vulnerable chips to try and keep people like us out, but with the head of a pin, you can very carefully pry them off. And then with some small side cutters, you can make room for some of the new cable runs. Now, I won't go into too much detail here as this isn't a mod chip installation tutorial, but what I'm doing is tapping into data lines so that our new mod chip can deliver a software payload that will then bypass Nintendo's new security measures. And if everything goes according to plan, this will allow us to run all sorts of homebrew software. Most of these data lines are available on the surface, but this one specific line is embedded inside the PCB, and I had to use the head of a pin to expose it. That part really freaked me out. And all told, this was probably the hardest micro soldering job I've ever attempted, and definitely not something that I would recommend to beginners. To make matters worse, the only way to test my connections was to reassemble the switch and try to turn it on while I was reassembling it. I applied some upgraded thermal paste and a brand new thermal pad to the Ram chips. This will link the switches memory to the overall cooling system and hopefully allow for some big performance gains. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself for now. Let's see if it even boots up. Plus turns on right now. I won't be very happy. Oh, okay. One light came on. That's a good sign. Hey, no SD card. All right. It actually worked. Wow. That’s kind of nerve racking. Okay, let's, put this thing back together and do a few cooling upgrades along the way. The biggest risk when pushing any electronics hardware to its limit is that you'll end up overheating it. And the Nintendo Switch is especially challenging in this regard because of its tight packaging. There's just not enough room inside of it to add more fans or heatsinks, so that means we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit as I reassemble the switch. I added layer after layer of thermal interface. The idea here is to create an unbroken chain between the heat generating components inside the switch and the outside world, which is fine in theory, except for the last piece of the chain. So this right here is the original switch OLED backplate, and while its an improvement over the original original switches backplate. It's still just made out of cheap plastic. So I went online and I bought this improved backplate. And well, it might look remarkably similar. Once you turn it around, you realize that this is milled out of a solid block of aluminum. And because aluminum is very thermally conductive, we can link this to all the heat generating components inside the switch and turn this backplate into a giant radiator. Oh, and also it has these larger air intakes here that should help to improve airflow too. After salvaging a few smaller parts from the OG backplate and then transplanting them onto the new backplate, I installed one last layer of thermal patterns. I now effectively had a switch with an extremely overspecced heatsink. All right, now that we got this thing all buttoned up, I'm immediately realizing that I'm going to have to take it apart again. But before we do that, let's get the software set up and see what this mod chip can do. So first thing is first here we have to protect ourselves against getting banned by Nintendo. Our first layer of defense is what's known as an Emunand. Basically, this is a copy of the switches file structure that lives on an SD card. And you can kind of think of it like a playground for experimenting with homebrew software. On the Emunand we are going to install atmosphere OS, which looks almost identical to the normal operating system, except it removes a bunch of Nintendo's constraints and allows us to run unsigned code. And trust me, we are going to have a lot of fun with this later. Our second layer of defense against Nintendo is editing this config file to prevent our switch from communicating with any of Nintendo's online services. And then finally, I want to install the switch overclock suite, which will allow us to unlock the potential of the switch OLED, or at least eventually it will. When you first get it, the only Overclocks available to you are very conservative in order to unlock the true potential of your switch. You have to download this loader.kip file, upload it to an online configuration tool, and then dial in your settings. So with a little bit of experimentation I found the limits of this particular switch. And yeah, they are pretty crazy. We'll do some benchmarking and testing later. But for now I need to solve a new problem that I've just created and overclock, which is going to consume a lot more power. And thus it's going to kill the battery life of our poor little switch here. So how are we going to fix that? Well, what's a bigger battery of course. Or actually rather, it's more like two batteries. So this actually ended up being the hardest part of the whole project, and I almost ended up writing it off entirely. But in the end, I pushed through and I actually learned a ton of stuff along the way. Just like with the cooling upgrades. Packaging is the first of many challenges that I had to overcome here. Inside the switch, there isn't enough room for two factory batteries, but there is enough room for two batteries from a defunct Chinese cell phone manufacturer. And as you can see, I actually got six, which we'll discuss more a second. These batteries have a slightly smaller capacity, but they're also physically much thinner. So after a little bit of trimming of the RF shielding and a tiny bit of the mid-frame, two of them should just fit inside of the switch. Our next challenge is going to be getting these batteries to play nicely with their new hardware. First I had to remove the stock battery management system. This PCB is responsible for keeping the battery from overheating, overcharging, and over discharging, but it also expects the battery to be connected to some very specific hardware. And if it isn't, the BMS will shut down the party. To get around that, I got these generic BMS boards to replace them. That way the batteries are still protected but are much more compliant for modding. And then I hit a new roadblock. My solder wouldn't stick to the terminals of these batteries. As it turns out, soldering to battery tabs requires a very specialized type of solder flux. So a couple of days later, this stuff showed up in the mail and allowed me to make those connections. Now, soldering to battery tabs is a delicate affair. Even with the right solder and flux, you want to do things as quickly as possible so you don't transmit much heat into the battery packs. Having a large soldering tip with a lot of thermal mass will really help here eventually with a bit of practice. I got all six cells connected. However, a bit of testing quickly revealed that my BMS boards weren't outputting the correct voltage. At first I thought I had damaged them or maybe done something wrong, but after a bit of research online, I realized that there may have been a manufacturing defect with these specific boards. To fix it, I had to short these two pairs of contacts with some short bits of wire, and after that they actually started functioning as intended. But the challenges didn't stop there. Next, I had to fully charge each battery, which sounds simple enough in theory, but how would you do that without anything to plug them into? Well, what I ended up doing was connecting them to a benchtop power supply. I configured it to deliver the maximum charging voltage for the cells and limited it to one amp of current. It started off delivering a constant current, and slowly the voltage of the cells rose. Eventually, you hit the max charging voltage and the current starts to drop. Once it hit zero, you know that the battery is fully charged and ready to go. Now remember how I said that these batteries came from a defunct Chinese cell phone manufacturer? Well, a little bit of rubbing alcohol revealed that these batteries have likely been sitting on a shelf for the past seven years. So in order to make sure that these cells were still viable, I wired them up to a simple testing circuit. This fully discharged each battery by heating up a resistor, and the screen then reports the total capacity of each cell. And wouldn’t you know it, a lot of them performed very poorly. Oh okay. So six batteries later and I have yet to find one that has anything close to the stated Amp hour rating. This one is the closest at 2.9. So I actually ordered... where’d it go?... where’d it go!? Oh there it is So I actually ordered two more batteries from a different company in hopes of getting better results. So fingers crossed we get some good ones here. Thankfully, after a bit more testing, I actually got one decently performing battery when combined with the best performing battery of the last batch. I should end up with a total capacity that's about 50% higher than the stock switch battery. And speaking of the factory battery, the next thing I did was harvest the factory BMS board by carefully scraping off this protective coating. I revealed these four contacts where I could then connect my new cells with that last little bit of soldering. Taken care of. I covered everything in electrically insulating tape, plugged in the battery and prayed it would work. But before we find out if it did. First let me give you a small preview of some upcoming builds. Thanks to the sponsor of today's video Aura frames, they make digital picture frames that are actually good. I've got their Carver Mat Frame here and it's loaded up with super top secret photos of stuff that I'm currently working on for future videos. Transferring photos and videos is as easy as downloading their app and selecting which content you want to have the frame display all Aura frames have bright, super high resolution, low reflectivity displays, which really helps to sell the illusion that this is a physical photo in a frame. Even looking off axis, there's no color shift, which means that your photos will always look the way that they're supposed to. Plus, the whole package is super intuitive and easy to use. I had my frame set up and running in less than five minutes. And the more the merrier. You can invite your friends and family to share photos to your Aura, or you can give one as a gift and then easily share photos with loved ones to get your own Aura Frame. Check out the link down in the video description and use the code Zacbuilds to get $35 off their best selling Carver Mat Frame. Plus, you even get free shipping. All right, now let's get back to building this Nintendo. Ah! it boots! Look at this. I'm on the main screen, and, yeah, it says the is the battery's pretty low, but that's to be expected because I just discharged both these batteries. Probably not the smartest thing running it like this. Okay, so now the next thing we need to do is see if we can reassemble this thing with that bigger battery pack in there, which should be fun. When I was reassembling the switch here instead of using the same thermal pads as I did before, I actually opted for K5 Pro, which is essentially the same thing, but just in a putty form. It does a much better job of conforming to the various layers inside the case, and as a result, should give us much better heat transfer. Now, I think it goes without saying here, but from a safety point of view, I really can't encourage any of you to follow my footsteps for all this battery stuff. I did this purely for my own curiosity and really just to see how far I could push the limits of switch. Oh man, it all fits together and it feels just like it did from the factory. Except it's probably a good 10 to 20% heavier now, so it's probably going to take at least a few cycles for this new big battery to properly calibrate. So we'll test it later. But in the meantime, I think we should go get started on a new dock. This factory one is fine, but it's a bit plain looking, and given all the mods we've done so far, I thought it'd be a good idea to add some active cooling. So over the past couple of weeks I have been working on this a 3D model of what I want my new dock to look like. But a 3D model isn't good for much, so let's turn this digital fantasy into reality. All of my early prototypes for my dock were made using my FDM style 3D printers. These are great at creating quick and cheap functional parts, but they've got a couple of drawbacks. The resolution is limited by the size of the nozzle used to squirt out the plastic, and you get a lot of layer lines that require significant post-processing in order to fix, just like I showed in my Dreamcast video. So I decided to go another route for my finished parts. For these, I brought my SLA or resin style 3D printer out of retirement. This style of printer uses an extremely high resolution LCD screen to expose layer after layer of UV sensitive resin. The result is extremely detailed parts that grow out of the tank and have very minimal printing artifacts. They're also super strong because they're printed at 100% infill. But like so many other things in life, there's a trade off here as well. These prints generally take longer. They require an alcohol bath to remove any excess resin you have to pry off the supports. And finally, all the parts have to take a trip through the disco box to make sure they're 100% cured. But I think the results speak for themselves when you compare an SLA print to an FDM print. Well, smooth features are actually smooth. There's a lot more detail, and overall they just look and feel a lot more high quality. Now we will still have to do a little bit of post-processing on these prints, but before we do that, I think we should head to the shop and make the other two parts of this stock. Classic walnut. You guys know I can't live without it. For this project, I wanted to do something new. In my last couple of videos, I've definitely incorporated wood, but more so as accent panels and ornamentation. This time around, I wanted to create entire components milled from solid pieces of wood to create a more integrated and cohesive design. Looks good. I think we got on the first try. The first round of milling left me with perfectly functional parts, but I also wanted to do a little bit of branding, so I fed one of the pieces back into the CNC. Given all the changes that we've made so far, I thought the moniker of Old Pro was fitting here. Obviously, Nintendo is very protective of their trademarks, so I made sure to use a font that was not the same as the original, and I also inverted the switches logo to make it even more clear that this is just parody. To really make the letters pop, I filled them in with a black stain, sanded off the excess spillover, and then sealed the walnut with an oil rub finish. Then it was time to do that. Minimal post-processing. All the 3D printed parts that I promised you earlier. First, I removed all the little goosebumps leftover from the supports, and then I sprayed on a few coats of what was labeled as flat black paint, but is very clearly satin or gloss black. Come on Krylon and get your s*** together. All right, so now that we have all of our pieces finished, we are almost ready to start putting everything together. But first, we have to harvest a couple of pieces out of the original. Switched off. The first one we need is the PCB. Now this handles charging and video output when the switch is plugged into the dock. The other thing we're going to need is what I like to call the springboard. But it's basically just a little PCB with a usb-C port on it that allows the switch to connect to the PCB. Oh, and then, and also we need this ribbon cable that will connect between them and, yeah, we don't really need this anymore. I feel like this is probably a good time to point out that if any of you guys at home want to make your own turbo charged dock there will be a link to the 3D print files down in the video description. And don't worry, I'll even include an alternate design so that you can 3D print the whole thing and then not have to worry about making any of the parts out of wood. Assembly at first was pretty straightforward, but this the parts bought right in reusing the hardware from the original dock. But then it was time to add that active cooling that I talked about earlier. But the original dock didn't have a fan. So how exactly are we going to power these new ones? Well, these are special five volt fans and the docks PCB just so happens to have two USB ports on it. A little trick that I've learned is that USB ports almost always have a five volt pin exposed on their back side. So by soldering the fans wires to that pin and a ground, we can bring them to life. But then that creates an entirely new problem, because those USB ports are always powered when the dock is plugged in, which means the fans would spend 24 over seven. So my solution was to integrate a momentary switch into the bottom of the dock. That way, whenever the console is in the dock, the switch will be depressed, the circuit is complete, and the fans will spin. Pretty simple right? In order to prevent the switch from rubbing against the dock, I included these channels that are just wide enough to accommodate some adhesive felt strips, and then I screwed the front plate in place. I didn't like the idea of having two big screw heads right in the front of the dock. So I use these special washers that allow you to screw a gold cap right over the exposed hardware, and everything looks nice and clean. Oh man, that looks so good. So now that we have our new dock assembled, what do you say we finally test out the limits of our new Switch Pro? Oh, yeah. So I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the cool things about hacking your switch is that you can run custom themes on it. So I actually created my own custom switch oled pro theme Anyways, first let's start with the overclock because like I said before, it's pretty crazy. On the switch you have three key clock speeds that you need to worry about, and they actually change depending on how you're using it. So here are the stock clock speeds in both handheld and docked mode. And now on to the overclock. My Switch Pro here can do just shy of 2.4GHz on the CPU, 1.1GHz on the GPU, and 2.4GHz on the Ram. And as a fun point of comparison, here are the maximum clock speeds that I was able to achieve on my hacked launch switch. Also, I think I should point out that with a hack switch, you can run whatever clock speed you like, regardless of whether it's in handheld mode or in a dock. That being said, a word of caution pushing these higher clock speeds can really stress the power delivery system of the switch, and you may end up decreasing its lifespan. So I probably wouldn't max everything out all at once. Moving right along. Well, I was in there tinkering with the clock speeds. I also took the opportunity to under volt the system as well. This is a bit in the weeds, but long story short, by ever so slightly decreasing the voltage that's supplied to the CPU and the GPU, you can actually get those components to run cooler and to consume less energy, which at least partially offsets the added stress on my new overclock. So all of that is great, but what kind of difference does it actually make in games? Well, it's a great question. So why don't we boot up tears the Kingdom and find out this game is notoriously hard to run for the switch, and it's not uncommon to see frame rates that drop down into the low 20s. With our new overclock profile, though, it's running at a locked 30 frames per second, which isn't really that impressive, is it? Why go to all of that effort for just a small increase in frame rates? Well, the problem is a lot of switch games are locked at 30 fps. So no matter how much horsepower you have, you can't exceed that limit. Or at least that's what I would be saying if this wasn't a hacked switch. It turns out we can use a program called locker to remove that 30 fps cap. And as you can see, it's now pretty close to pulling off a locked 60 FPS, which is honestly insane. You're basically doubling the factory performance, and you also get a significant boost to load times. That being said, running 60 FPS in tears of the Kingdom kind of breaks the game. You're basically doing everything at double speed. But the nice thing about the switch OC suite is that you can configure different overclocks for different games. So for tears of the Kingdom, I keep it locked at 30 fps and then use a more conservative overclock profile to ensure that I don't get any performance drops while still maintaining decent battery life. And speaking of battery life, let's talk about how our new big battery fares. If I were to run the switch at its stock volts and clock speeds, I'd get about 50% more battery life out of it. So in the range of 6 to 8 hours playing, here's the kingdom with my balls. The wall 60 fps overclock profile. It's probably more like 2 to 3 hours, which is admittedly a big hit, but again, you can configure your own power profiles anywhere in between. So with that more conservative overclock, it'll do six hours all day long. We'll still making the game a lot more playable. I could even configure my own Super Battery saver mode if I wanted to, and maybe eke nine hours with a little bit of voltage magic and in case you are worried about my crazy overclock damaging the switch to excess heat, well, I wouldn’t, it’s honestly just fine. In the dock, we are sitting at a comfortable 40 degrees and even in handheld the temps don't really get much higher than 50. Some other bonus features of having a hack switch are the ability to whip your games right on to the system. That way, you don't have to physically switch cartridges in order to play different games. You can also run emulators for a huge array of retro consoles, and then this last one might just be my favorite. With the help of a little program called moonlight, I can actually stream games from my PC so as long as I'm at home or somewhere with really good WiFi, I can play high end Triple-A PC games on my switch, which basically makes this thing a better version of the PlayStation portal. So that's all the good stuff. Now let's talk about how we could have made it even better in the postmortem analysis. This is an esthetic thing, but I probably should have ordered a black rear cover to go with my whole black and white color scheme. I think I probably thought this was white when I ordered it. Next up, the fans in the dock will run any time that the switch is plugged in, even if it's just for charging. Ideally, they'd be connected to a temperature sensor, and then they'd only kick on when they're actually needed. And then lastly, the fans are a tiny bit loud, and I think that's due to the relatively restricted airflow of the dock. I bet if I spent just a bit more time really dialing in these air ducts, I could get the airflow to be a bit less turbulent and thus a little bit quieter. That's it for this one. Check out the 3D print files for this project. If you want to make your own custom dock at home, I will see you guys in the next video. Peace.
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Channel: Zac Builds
Views: 558,872
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: diy, woodworking, crafts, building, build, diyproject, construction, woodcraft, craft, builds, nintendo switch, nintendo switch 2, nintendo switch oled, switch modding, switch mods, switch oled mods, switch mod chip, switch oled mod, microsoldering, modding, mods, diy modding, diy electronics, battery mod switch, switch battery mod, switch big battery, switch overclock, switch upgrades, switch oled upgrades, switch dock upgrade, switch dock, switch oled, switch overclock suite
Id: anqTCgHxq6Q
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 24min 43sec (1483 seconds)
Published: Mon May 06 2024
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