Source
MavyPOP•

This is a tutorial I wrote to build a homebrew chip reader that can read Progress and Advanced Battle Chips and stream the result over USB. Source code is included. With additional programming, you can interpret the chip ID from the stream and send commands to your Chip Gate emulators to get the full experience.

This was my first all-from-scratch electrical engineering projects so I do not claim to be an expert and there are some gotchas I've written about in the intro of the tutorial. I'm interested in improving it and later, reducing the form factor so we can print 3D enclosures for it; making it a truly portable USB chip reader.

Go make stuff! Enjoy!

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SnowwyMcDuck•

This looks so cool, I want to get the funds together to try this as my first little electrical project. I've been wanting to get into Ardino and RaspberryPi projects for a long time and this one has really got me hyped up for it again.

I do wonder, is there a way to make this work for the Link chips, basically I am wondering if it's possible to homebrew the Link Gate or Beast Link Gate??

Just being hopeful with the Link Gate idea, but I am looking forward to working on this project, thank you for posting it.

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MavyPOP•

Every chip works the same way except the power pin is in different spots so you have to interpret the 1's and 0's in a different order to get the right code. The only chip info it cannot read is Navi chip data because they have on-board EEPROMS to store 2kb of navi gameplay data.

As for a homebrew link gate yes it's totally possible. I'd like to make this into a smaller form-factor and provide scripts to emit to your emulators.

There might be a way to make it link to hardware gba/sp but that required knowing nintendo's hardware which I have no knowledge of.

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