Hm – doesn’t “counting in binary” mean that he only didn’t bother converting the data into some other form but simply outputs it to the ports of the AVR?

Where does everything need a Arduino? Seriously, this could have been done on a PC parallel port with a few LEDs and resistors….over kill IMO

@kyle You can see from the screenshot that it reads the console .log file. This is lame stuff…

Hey all, this is IceColdFreezie. Here’s how it works more in depth:
The VB program reads through TF2′s console log file and checks for your name and the words Killed, Suicided, or Died and adds 1 to the appropriate counter. If you get a kill, a variable called lifeKills goes up by 1 and if you die it resets to 0. This is sent to the Arduino every time it changes, and is converted to binary and displayed on the LEDs (I don’t have a 7 segment display)

As I said in the video description, its nothing too spectacular or useful.

Also, @poot: Could you explain how that would work? It sounds cool and I’d like to simplify it all but I have no idea how to do that stuff.

He should have made the arduino into an aimbot.

Hahaha, don’t kill me!
I’m learning C++ but i’m still a failure at it

Gee, eleven wires? I cloned it a couple minutes ago with only six.

Really, though, pretty cool little thing. Might throw one together and take it to my PC gamer friend’s house.

@ICeColdFreezie: Use Inpout to use the parallel port. it consists of inpout32.dll for the executable but you’ll need to get the .lib to compile your own program. I’m sure it works with C/C++ and I think I saw a VB port one time. You could just directly connect the LEDs to the Parallel port pins through resistors.

Believe me, i’m as surprised as you are, haha.

Remember back when you started out in electronics yourself. Blinking a LED was an accomplishment, counting in binary on a few LEDs a cool thing. This post must be very motivational to IceColdFreezie.

Whether or not Hack-a-Day should provide quality posts, or be the source of motivation for beginners by posting their beginner projects is something I leave up to the discretion of HaD and its readers…

To IceColdFreezie: keep playing with that Arduino despite of all off-putting comments people make about it. It is a good tool for learning and having fun, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll be whining at the uber-hackers for posting lame hacks! :-)

I really don’t see how making something count in binary is cool. It seems like a step backwards, a unnecessarily harder way to do a simple task. I bet if Ford made a new car that required the driver to step out every few minutes, open the hood, and adjust a knob for the ignition timing (which had an Arduino flashing an LED whenever the timing was off) then hackaday would basically be all over it as the ultimate car for geeks.

This site used to be cool before it turned into an obnoxious rambling commercial for Arduinos.

Arduino + VB, do you see pattern here ? so familiar pattern in specific group of people

^^^LOL @ Umm… :)