There’s no question that Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) was an impressive piece of hardware when it was released in 2004, but for all its technical magic, it hasn’t been able to move the grip like Nintendo’s Vice in the handheld market. Perhaps this explains why we still see so many nostalgia-fueled hacks for Nintendo’s Game Boy and Dual Screen (DS) systems, when PSP hacks are few and far between.
But looking at the kind of project that turns PSP into a capable robot controller (video, embedded below) we can’t help but wonder if the community is lost. Thanks to an open source software development kit for the system, [iketsj] Was able to write a WiFi controller program that could be run on any PSP with a homebrew-compatible firmware.
The other side of the equation is a simple robot powered by an ESP32. To control the bot, the user connects their handheld to the WiFi network offered by the MCU and fires the controller application from the main menu. It’s all very chic, and the fact that you don’t have to make any changes to the PSP’s hardware is a huge plus. From the video after the break we get the idea that the remote software is quite simple in its current form, but we imagine that the only real limitation is how good you are at writing C code for which today’s values would be considered a fairly limited resource. Method. We want to see the widescreen display glow and show live first-person video from a bot’s perspective.
Many of the PSP hacks we’ve seen over the years are recovering hardware or, in some cases, replacing the system internally with something raspberry flavored. These projects have certainly been interesting in their own way, but we really like the idea of being able to push a larger stock system into a new role by writing some custom code for it.