Most of the week’s real progress happened off camera. WLED wasn’t giving what this build needed, so the firmware got rewritten from scratch.
Custom LED Firmware
ESP32-S3, Bluetooth-controllable, multiple animation patterns, built to run stable for a long time without restarting. WLED is a solid project but for this specific application — lighting that needs to behave a particular way inside a sealed console shell — rolling custom firmware was the right call.
Showed the light panel live: slow blue multi-shade fade, five tones cycling. That’s going into the giveaway console.
Full Giveaway Spec — Now Locked
The complete build spec for the giveaway N64 is finalized. Here’s exactly what the winner gets:
- New replacement shell
- Complete capacitor recap
- RGB mod (VDC-NUS)
- BlueRetro internal Bluetooth modification (hardware version 1)
- USB-C power mod
- WS2812B LED lighting with Bluetooth web configuration
- GBSC scaler plus cable
One thing worth knowing about the BlueRetro v1 board: it multiplexes all four controller ports. That means a physical switch goes in to toggle between Bluetooth and wired modes. The switch is part of the build. Clean solution, just something the winner will want to understand before they plug in a wired controller.
Giveaway Date: July 3rd
Friday, July 3rd. Thirty days from that stream. Ten years from the cardiac event that this build is marking. The date is not arbitrary.
Lab Rearrangement
Also used the week to reorganize the workspace. Cameras on stands, overhead cam repositioned behind, tools in labeled totes. Better setup. Should have done it sooner.
Short stream that night — forgot the afternoon pain meds and it caught up. Next session is the physical case modification: cutting the opening for the Waveshare LCD screen.
Rob streams live repairs and builds every Tuesday and Saturday at 7pm Eastern on Twitch. The Bonus Life N64 build — a complete custom Nintendo 64 being rebuilt from scratch and given away July 3rd, 2026 — is the current main series.