Awesome. A really wonderful idea. Form follows function. Everything should work like that.

Have a nice day
Richard

Very well done project. press could be done with some springs and a button… the (rather heavy) springs would mostly hold the mice (and the ball) up, but pressing down would be possible, maybe activating one of the existing mouse buttons. A better holder would have to be designed first, and some experimentation with various compression springs to see how much resistance would be needed.

@36chambers

I didn’t use any particular books, but I scrounged most of what I needed from the Arduino website (http://www.arduino.cc), and then asked my friends a million annoying questions.

its kind of loud… :/ maybe grease it up, replace any metal balls you used with optical mouse balls.

Neat, but I think I would want more inertia. I’d want to roll the thing and have it keep spinning for a bit.

have you thought of using the sensor that a mouse uses and putting it under the ball on the base so instead of you holding the mouse up to it the ball, the ball will have its own sensor so the PlayStation can read it like a controller

good use of existing technology without having to reinvent the wheel (or ball).

could the background clatter be any louder? a toilet flushing in the background would have completed the soundtrack! give those people behind the camera a dope slap to the back of the head.

@grey
Ball mice are optical mice, yes I do find the concept of “optical” optical mice confusing.

Watch this video, about 50 seconds in:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-escapist-presents/639-World-of-Her-PWN-Four

About that time I was rolling on the floor too ;)

This is neat, I would suggest that if your Arduino runs on 5 volts just use the USB port on the PS2 to power it.

I liked Katamari Damacy, but the controls were not intuitive, they didn’t work like real tanks should, you needed to use all 4 axis, almost just to torture you. No real reason for it.

I wonder if you could hack up the control scheme of the game (using an action replay or gameshark) to use a single standard mouse plugged into USB (put all the programming onto the PS2 platform), or maybe even using the Playstation mouse.

I would love a beach-ball sized controller floating on an air base, perhaps with the right optics you could focus a mouse on the floating surface, you could position an IR break sensor below it, and pressing the ball down would activate the presses (I forget, what were the presses used for again?)

Also you could figure out a way to translate the inputs to one single mouse using logic. Basically reverse-engineering the software the game is using to convert 4 input axis into 2 motion axis, then putting that on-board the Arduino.

Also I have converted a standard PSX controller to have the left analog stick where the d-pad was, after I got Katamari I started wanting to move the left stick up to where the action buttons were, kinda like a handheld version of this: http://curmudgeongamer.com/2005/10/ace-combat-and-dual-analog-flight.html

PS, love the music, that game is freaking awesome.

^^^lol @ Phantasm reference… :)

do you guys even spell check?