I received a Dragon Injector over the weekend:
The Dragon Injector is a project by a Canadian guy 'MatinatorX' who's pretty much developed and produced the whole thing single handedly along with a little software help by some of the guys in the community. It's been in development approx 18 months and has gone through a series of design iterations. This is pretty much the first public release and it's version 19!
The Dragon Injector is a payload injector to enable running custom firmware. Payload injectors are nothing new and have been around since late 2018. Payloads can also be injected via a PC or android phone. The beauty of the DI is that it fits in the game card slot and so you don't need to carry additional dongles around and/or a USB cable. It also has a RCM jig which clips into the cap and saves carrying one of those around with you too.
I've been following the project on GBATemp] and on discord and I've really enjoyed following along with the progress. There's been a few challenges along the way but I can't fault how MatinatorX has approached or handled any of it. The 'game cart' cases were 3D printed by MatinatorX from resin. Its the first 3D resin printed object I've seen in the flesh and the quality of the printing is amazing. There has been some issues with some of the retaining clip breaking on some of the V19 shells so MatinatorX is working on a revised design to ship out to those affected. For V20 he's looking to get the cases injection moulded. The dies for these will cost thousands but he's willing to stump up the cash to make the best product possible. He's truly a man after my own heart
Along with that, he's also working on a project called [DragonMMC].
This started as a project called Dragon Kicker to replace the OEM Switch kickstand with a replacement that could hold three MicroSD cards.
This then evolved to adding a PCB to the kickstand so that multiple MicroSD cards could be used and switched between. This has now evolved into DragonMMC:
Description from the GBATemp thread linked above:
What the heck is it? Well, DragonMMC is an internal modchip that replaces the stock MicroSD and NAND boards, snapping in place and adding a little slide switch that lets you choose between up to 3 MicroSD cards and/or NAND modules. This slide switch protrudes slightly from the original MicroSD card slot, while a replacement kickstand (formerly known as DragonKicker) houses the MicroSD cards themselves. Installation does not require any soldering or modification to the shell of the console, but does requires some disassembly, and as of right now removing the heat shield is needed for everything to fit nicely. The kickstand is still thin enough that using the standard dock poses no problems. Prototype PCBs are being made right now, and I hope to have some proper photos and proof of concept videos in the coming weeks!
Now, while the primary purpose of DragonMMC is to easily switch between NAND modules and MicroSD cards, it can also be used to inject payloads! To that end, I've made a USB interface board that, through the magic of 3M 9703 conductive tape, sticks to the USB test points and allows payload injection with zero soldering required. Please not though, that at this time this hasn't been tested, so keep your expectations in check, at least for now! As with the DragonInjector, payloads are chainloaded from your MicroSD card(s).
NAND chips can get pretty pricey though, and not everyone needs 3 of them, nor do they necessarily need a whole 256GB to work with. To that end, DragonMMC was created to be modular, with 3 universal NAND module slots available. An adapter module for the OEM NAND makes it easy to use, while extra NAND modules of 64GB and 256GB are being developed right now. The modules are snap-in and also do not require any soldering. As of now, the only caveat to using the OEM NAND is that it's so big it needs to be relocated!
Basically, it will allow you to have add two extra NANDS to the original NAND (three in total) and have a MicroSD card attached to each. All three NANDs/MicroSDs will be isolated from each other. This will allow you to run three installs, for example NAND 1 = Official Firmware, NAND 2 = Custom Firmware, NAND 3 = Android or Linux etc.
The whole project is really interesting and I love the potential use of 3M 9703 conductive 'Z axis' tape for the solderless install of the proposed additional injection functionality, that's something I've never seen before.
I'm really looking forward to following this project further and watching it come into fruition
The Dragon Injector is a project by a Canadian guy 'MatinatorX' who's pretty much developed and produced the whole thing single handedly along with a little software help by some of the guys in the community. It's been in development approx 18 months and has gone through a series of design iterations. This is pretty much the first public release and it's version 19!
The Dragon Injector is a payload injector to enable running custom firmware. Payload injectors are nothing new and have been around since late 2018. Payloads can also be injected via a PC or android phone. The beauty of the DI is that it fits in the game card slot and so you don't need to carry additional dongles around and/or a USB cable. It also has a RCM jig which clips into the cap and saves carrying one of those around with you too.
I've been following the project on GBATemp] and on discord and I've really enjoyed following along with the progress. There's been a few challenges along the way but I can't fault how MatinatorX has approached or handled any of it. The 'game cart' cases were 3D printed by MatinatorX from resin. Its the first 3D resin printed object I've seen in the flesh and the quality of the printing is amazing. There has been some issues with some of the retaining clip breaking on some of the V19 shells so MatinatorX is working on a revised design to ship out to those affected. For V20 he's looking to get the cases injection moulded. The dies for these will cost thousands but he's willing to stump up the cash to make the best product possible. He's truly a man after my own heart
Along with that, he's also working on a project called [DragonMMC].
This started as a project called Dragon Kicker to replace the OEM Switch kickstand with a replacement that could hold three MicroSD cards.
This then evolved to adding a PCB to the kickstand so that multiple MicroSD cards could be used and switched between. This has now evolved into DragonMMC:
Description from the GBATemp thread linked above:
What the heck is it? Well, DragonMMC is an internal modchip that replaces the stock MicroSD and NAND boards, snapping in place and adding a little slide switch that lets you choose between up to 3 MicroSD cards and/or NAND modules. This slide switch protrudes slightly from the original MicroSD card slot, while a replacement kickstand (formerly known as DragonKicker) houses the MicroSD cards themselves. Installation does not require any soldering or modification to the shell of the console, but does requires some disassembly, and as of right now removing the heat shield is needed for everything to fit nicely. The kickstand is still thin enough that using the standard dock poses no problems. Prototype PCBs are being made right now, and I hope to have some proper photos and proof of concept videos in the coming weeks!
Now, while the primary purpose of DragonMMC is to easily switch between NAND modules and MicroSD cards, it can also be used to inject payloads! To that end, I've made a USB interface board that, through the magic of 3M 9703 conductive tape, sticks to the USB test points and allows payload injection with zero soldering required. Please not though, that at this time this hasn't been tested, so keep your expectations in check, at least for now! As with the DragonInjector, payloads are chainloaded from your MicroSD card(s).
NAND chips can get pretty pricey though, and not everyone needs 3 of them, nor do they necessarily need a whole 256GB to work with. To that end, DragonMMC was created to be modular, with 3 universal NAND module slots available. An adapter module for the OEM NAND makes it easy to use, while extra NAND modules of 64GB and 256GB are being developed right now. The modules are snap-in and also do not require any soldering. As of now, the only caveat to using the OEM NAND is that it's so big it needs to be relocated!
Basically, it will allow you to have add two extra NANDS to the original NAND (three in total) and have a MicroSD card attached to each. All three NANDs/MicroSDs will be isolated from each other. This will allow you to run three installs, for example NAND 1 = Official Firmware, NAND 2 = Custom Firmware, NAND 3 = Android or Linux etc.
The whole project is really interesting and I love the potential use of 3M 9703 conductive 'Z axis' tape for the solderless install of the proposed additional injection functionality, that's something I've never seen before.
I'm really looking forward to following this project further and watching it come into fruition
