Tired of swapping out dead batteries in your Pixel Pals? Here’s a quick hack to make them run on USB power. No more swapping AAA’s, just plug and play.

Simple Battery to USB Conversion Using a Buck Converter

My brother grabbed me some “Pixel Pals” for Christmas a few years back. They’re really neat and complement the gaming area of the office well. However, they run off of two AAA batteries that burn out after six hours. Neither Mario nor MegaMan are ever lit up because I really don’t like the idea of wasting batteries like that.

So I rewired it!

A $2 buck converter (like these) can drop 5V USB power to 3.3V, and given the size of the converter, it fits nicely in the battery compartment. All that’s needed is to desolder the battery terminals, dremel a space for the USB cable and step-down board, hot glue the buck converter in place, then solder some wires to the +/-. Super easy stuff here.

I really like how clean and easy this conversion was. Taking them apart is a real pain in the ass, but it’s easier if you take your time and use a sharp chisel rather than a blunt flathead and hot air gun like I started with.