DomoticPS2: My first serious project

The Idea

In the year 2005, my studies in Computer Engineering were coming to an end and a final challenge presented itself to me: the end-of-degree project. At that time, the Sony PlayStation 2 was the video game console that dominated the market, present in practically every household on the planet. One day, at my friend Adri’s house, we dreamed out loud and it occurred to us that it would be great to automate homes… with a PlayStation 2. I knew that the PS2 had been hacked and that there was a community of hackers developing software to run on it, known as “homebrew”.

The Beginning

We loved challenges, so we decided that if we could turn on a light bulb with a PS2, we would have a project. All we needed was a tutor. We loved how Julio Ortega, a professor of Computer Architecture at the UGR, explained things, and we decided to present the idea to him. He was on board from the start, so we got to work. After 2 months of work, we managed to port a USB-Serial driver to the PS2’s IO processor and, by pressing the famous “X” on the dual shock, the light bulb lit up. The project had begun.

The Result

Almost a year later, we presented the project. We had managed to create an engine that loaded maps created with the Quake 3 map editor, including a video player, scene manager, OSD, and of course, a slideshow to make the presentation from the console itself.

The Icing on the Cake

But, without a doubt, the most outstanding achievement was programming the PS2’s vector processor. At that time, the PS2’s VPU was a beast. We’re talking about a SIMD vector processor, designed for 3D computing. One of the most costly and satisfying developments was the polygon clipper, which took me almost 3 months.

I still remember DomoticPS2 as the first serious and beautiful project I ever did… and it’s been a while since then.