Happy Birthday!
- Pedro Torres
- Jul 10
- 10 min read
July marks another year of the shop being around and me getting another year older. It's been a hot minute since the last blog so let me tell you all the things that's been going on this year so far in; and outside; the shop.
Quick PSA
I noticed that some people who requested service quotes never viewed them and let them expire. Please be sure to add renewedgamingrelics@gmail.com to your whitelist or check your spam folder. I only send out a single reminder after 1 week if it's not been seen. All of those that expire are deleted. Those whom either accepted quotes, but never sent their items to be serviced will have those voided as well; this includes those whom have ceased comminucations. As of this post, Section 6 of my Terms and Conditions have been updated to reflect this and any accepted estimated that have had no attempted followups or followups that have ceased will be deleted.
Side note - USPS will have updated their policies on July 12th. Below is the summary of things. Regarding the $7.50, I checked with the post office asking them about coin cell batteries, and it doesn't seem like the surcharge will apply for them until there's a certain amount of lithium before qualifying as hazmat, but they will know more once the 12th rolls around as I will have questions about batteries for the DS stuff. ALWAYS declare batteries regardless and be responsible.
Package dimension used are being rounded up to the next WHOLE inch. if you're sending out packages, measure the outside and add 1 to it if it's not near an inch,
Hazard Declaration Failure charge. you WILL be charge a non-negotiable $50 for failure to declare if your package has any hazardous materials. Always declare things with batteries, doesn't matter if they're secured inside their device or secured outside the device; both following regulatory packaging requirements - it doesn't matter if things are working or not. Aerosols, cleaning agents, fuels, NAIL POLISH (that's a weird one, but probably because of the diluted acetone), paint, perfume. USPS has available what counts as hazardous materials in case you're ever curious. There will be a flat $7.50 base fee for priority packages with hazmat,
Oversized / Overweight packages are subject to a $200 surcharge. If your sending or receiving a package that's heavier than 70lbs or package ((width + height)) x 2) larger than 130, then expect to pay another $200.
Shipments less than 1lb will be charged the 1lb rate
USB-C Mod Updates
The V2 of the WiiU Gamepad Docking Station USB-C mod is now out!! V1's are discontinued on the main site and remaining stock off to eBay. The new arrangement sits much easier following some feedback. Expect other revisions to come as time moves on.
2 new USB-C mods have been worked on this year with a redesign of one other. The PS2 USB-C mod had been released for pre-orders, the NES USB-C Multi-AV out mod is one test away with new boards to be completed, and the WiiU gamepad docking station got an update to make assembly easier.
Recently, I have temporarily suspended taking pre-orders for the PS2 USB-C mod. The initial PD Sink Controller that I have based the solution on went out of production with its successor released this year and luckily uses the same custom footprint. However, it was intially on backorder until the end of September so any pre-orders would be fulfilled between October and November. Fast forward, NOW, that same lead time has been pushed back to February 1st 2027 after being delayed to mid December a few weeks prior!!. While I have placed a clear disclaimer on delays and lead times on the listing, I could not in good faith give people a timeline or potentional moving timeline for when someone would get their order. Pre-orders made were fulfilled as I have found some sink controllers I had left over from development. This also affects the NES mod sadly. I have placed an order for the sink controllers to see when I would actually have some to then reopen pre-orders. I pray there aren't any more delays. If so, I may have to reconsider the sink controller again after having picked the perfect one.... Imagine if I crowd sourced this and then had to announce the delays like that; I don't think that'd fly too well and would definetly lose trust over it, and that's very bad.
The NES Front Loader features the classic Nintendo Multi-AV Out port, RCA out, USB-C power, EZ support for the Lumacode HDMI mod, EZ support for Timworthingtons RGB mod coming with terminated cables, and the ability to easily set desired outputs with solder pads to for audio and video! You can set the RCA video out to either be the onboard composite or the Lumacode out, the Multi-AV out to use the onboard composite or the RGB mod composite, and the Multi-AV out port to use either the onboard audio as stereo, or the RGB mod audio out as stereo. Expect these features to be in the FMC mod update.
With the design requirements between the mods, I can now easily and quickly start designing mods for the FAT PS1, Dreamcast, Saturn, PS2 Slim, and PSOne without fretting about current needs or varied voltage profiles. The only restriction now is the sink controller that dictates supply.
Design updates for the SNES and SFC mods will be done in short time to make them more robust while maintaining the aesthetic.
FDM Printer
I got a Qidi Q2C with the Qidi Box. It's been great out of the box using PCTG. PETG comes out fine; and PLA took a bit before it became fine. Recently the Q2C decided to crap itself during print jobs. I've contacted Qidi support after diving into the hardware to figure out what the possible causes could be. In short, the box extruder is yanking back filament as the hot end extruder is pulling filament. This strips the filament, and leaves nothing in the chamber to extrude - it's wild. Hopefully Qidi can fix it since it's barely been 2 months since I got it. They sent replacement parts, I got em installed, the filament sensor doesn't wanna fit right, and the saga continues.
The optional mount for PS2 USB-C mod for it to play nice with the Retro Gem is done with PCTG, and I have in mind for the NES mod chassis parts to be done in PCTG as well. It would be nice to have PCTG versions of the USB-C mods for solid color options like solid black and white.
Once it gets repaired, more improvements around the shop as well products can be made!
The Saturn 2 I got last year hasn't pulled it's weight so I don't know what I'll be doing with it for the time being. If it can pull off translucent prints well, then horray! I won't mind it to be dedicated for one resin while the Mono SE does the smokey black.
Home Lab
If you've seen some of my posts on Discord, YT, and BSky, you know that I've been working on setting up my own home lab for my home office a number of projects. This is something important that I want to do to reduce the risks from last years tech failure and have something more robust and with future proofing built-in.
A homelab section has been added in the Resources section of the Discord! See what I've been looking through, setting up, fixes for issues poorly documented, and whatever else on my journey.
I have 2 piholes running in a redundant vlan that serve as custom DNS servers so I don't need to use anyone elses DNS. I've set up Tailscale for a personal VPN which I can also tie a paid vpn service to and cover the network as a whole making something handy to VERY handy. I've JUST finished building a custom RPi 5 wireless router with 2.5 gigbit lan and tri-band gigbit wifi with a 12db gain anteanna. It's been a pain with how fiddly the ribbon cables can be while learning how to have openwrt work like you'd want it to as any commercial piece of router firmware. Somehow DHCP just says it doesn't want to work to assign IPs so there's more to fix and figure out in openwrt - it's unlike any router platform I've used. Also, I learned that you need an anteanna per signal band you want to transmit; you can't use one adapter to transmit multiple SSID bands. The next step would be to set up B.A.T.M.A.N. for a self healing mesh as I'd add on APs to expand the wifi. This can be a very cheap option if you want a wireless lan with a single wavelength SSID, but the moment you want a wired network and / or a multiple wavelengths to broadcast SSIDs, it gets expensive fast - that's not to mention if you want to make a mesh network lol
The next piece I'm working on which I hope to have done soon is establishing CEPH for network storage instead of a traditional NAS. Having a decentralized netork storage solution is ideal since it's hardware agnostic and self-healing should hardware fail. It will be great for CEPH to auto backup some disks as well as make a number of virtual disks to mount and easily share across my computers. Having images that I could easily flash and deploy will be awesome to host. Like openwrt, Debian is something that's been a little annoying, but I'm stuck with it due to the UGreen hardware I'm using as well as plan to use RetroNAS in concert with it. After being it being angry and a complete environment redo after dealing errors, I have a happy working CEPH with 3 managers and 1 OSD. It doesn't like the 1 OSD, but there's no errors in any logs anywhere, and I like that. The coolest thing about CEPH is that it's hadware agnostic, is free and open source, runs on Debian and Ubuntu, and doesn't care if your storage is on a HDD, SDD, or USB drive. If it has storage and can be accessed on the network on linux, Ceph will love it. The big work is on the set up and many tutorials are incomplete which can frustrate anyone, especially myself, when errors pop up while the official documentation isn't clear cut.
I'll probably set up an environment monitoring system next. Gotta have a way to let me know if the air is bad for my health!
Afterwards will be home security with ESP32 cameras set up with an arduino that will pass through to another pi. I should be able to ulize an encrypted PAN via Bluetooth to keep power consumption at an absolute minimum.
While I'm not the most skilled with Linux, it's been nice learning the tools on the platform and build something useful that easily scales up with skills I can use elsewhere. Homelabbing can get pretty expensive the deeper you go, but in a world where you own less and less of everything you "buy" this is one measure for maintainted true ownership.
Here's the WIP router
Hot Sauces
You know I love a good hot sauce; If you didn't, now you know. I have been working on my reciepes and was able to finalize my first two signature sauces out of the 10 reciepes I've made. Everything is themed, and I'm sure some people may be able to figure it out I shart shelling out the names and profiles. I eventually want to make my 2nd business off it and currently been looking at the "best" option to go from start to finish as there's different certifications, lisceneses, and regulations you need to follow if you go solo or have someone else do the heavy lifting. The money that all needs is quite a chunk which doesn't include trademark registration which I will do as well like I did for Gamers Antiquity®. I am tired of the generic nature of some hot sauces where there's heat, but no flavor; I WANT BOTH! and friends and family love my reciepes.
My Mars FireShot is max umami with Habanero as the hero chili pepper. Easy on easy off heat, not punching you in the face with heat, it's that classic "good on everything" whether it's fish, poultry, pork, or red meat. It makes the best hot honey with a 50/50 or 60/40 to preference, and a addon to mix with other sauces missing that "something" to make things better. I love it. It flavor is clear and pronounced without overpowering the food it's used with nor is overwhelemed by the heat. Can I make it better? YES! Will I? Maybe.
My Gaias' Brilliance is a Szcheuan hot sauce celebrating the szcheuan peppercorns and chili peppers. Bright, cirtusy, somehow a little refreshing, cold heat with that classic numbing factor, this hot sauce is proving to be another "good on everything" with a heavier pairing for fish and red meat, but works excellently for burgers. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I have been.
There's a 3rd in dispute as I have two that are half way complete... the balance is hard between heat and flavor when it comes to the theme for the flavor and the chilli peppers I have in mind as everything is a blend and I don't want to reuse any one blend across multiple flavors.
My coming brand will have a array of unique flavors that will bring out the best in your cooking making things more exciting for your pallet.
Other Endeavors
I may have bitten more than I could chew with a secondary focus since the years half over and I've not released spare parts though I have designs ready. All of them need adjustments and I need the FDM printer issue resolved. there hasn't been time to do mold castings like there was last year as I've taken to putting time into the homelab for disaster recovery and data privacy. Once things are more set with the Qidi, I expect to continue working on parts and things for the homelab.
If people are interested in what I'm doing with the homelab hit me up on the socials. idk if peeps would want any videos - I'm no expert, but I could probably do an overview of sorts and what I have going on.
I am getting to looking into getting quotes for NanoFlowX if not get a starter kit out the gate that way I can start offering that service.
As for anything else, I think that's it. Doing these every few months is nice to summerize what's been going on. I don't think I could do a monthly type blog since I break up work across every shifting priority. Anywho, thank you for reading and I'll see you next time!
- Pedro
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