I’m still out of town extra

posted Feb 19th 2008 7:16pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: misc hacks

I received some good stuff via the tips line while I’ve been making an extra stop after Shmoocon. I spent the day helping my less project endowed family run some new wiring (and made some awesome sparks in the process.)

[Damian] sent in his customized version of the classic Atari 2600 adventure game.
[iraqiGeek] sent in his efforts to use the six-axis controller. He used lib-usb and PPJoy to create his own app.

[HP Friedrichs] sent in this interesting post on building military style power supplies. Good stuff if you’re into building your own gear and like interesting chassis designs.

[John] sent in his version of the new KITT’s light bar. (You know you watched it.)

Got something good to share? Use the tips line.

Comments [3]

Reader Comments

The power supply looks cool. Also, making sparks when wiring is fun, unless someone gets zapped… I assume no one did, or you’dve mentioned it, correct?

Posted at 8:48 pm on Feb 19th, 2008 by Skyler Orlando

Thanks for the SIXAXIS link — I spent a *long* time wrestling with mine a week or so ago. For basic SIXAXIS gamepad use, Google “sixaxisdriver.exe” — it’s Japanese, but once you install it there’s not much to look at, and I think it’s in English at that point anyway. There’s a “Sixaxis_en.exe” driver that went around about a year ago, but a lot of people (myself included) had problems.

This is interesting, though — could be a good way of harnessing the gyros in that sucker. Of course, the linked-to guy references Carl Kenner (sounds like a bit of a nutjob, but he’s all we’ve got =-), and I thought GlovePIE already had SIXAXIS support, sooo…. I dunno.

Posted at 10:34 am on Feb 20th, 2008 by James

On the power supply:

I built something very similar to run my ham radio stuff.
I found a similar case, but mine was painted navy gray and originally held explosive bolts (very cool stenciling)

I was only aiming for a reliable 5-6 amps output at 12 volts since it was only intended to run my 2 meter handheld and maybe a light source, so I used a 7ah sla battery and an 8 amp digital power supply to make what I called an “uninturuptable DC power supply”.

Very basic, it uses a relay for switching and a fully automatic charger to maintain the battery.
I don’t like how meters can get messed up with rough handling, so I used some basic colored LEDs as indicators for power.

I should take some photos of mine to share since it’s so similar.
Bummer I finished it just in time to stop being so active in ham radio.

73 de n2nlq!

Posted at 12:51 pm on Feb 20th, 2008 by strider_mt2k