SNES Controller + USB + Accelerometer

As we posted about [Atarity]’s XBMC hiding in an SNES controller, we were finishing work on a tutorial for [Adafruit]. The tutorial combines a Teensy USB development board with a 3D accelerometer inside of an SNES controller. The Teensy is programmed to poll the SNES controller buttons and read the accelerometer values. The buttons are set to keystrokes and mouse buttons, and the accelerometer values are processed into mouse movement. Programmed to play Portal, we created a video showing how to use the device. You can see it after the break.

It was not quite as easy or quick as the typical PC gamer left hand: WASD, right hand: mouse stance. However, we can think of a number of other games that could be improved with the use of a device that, with a bit of hacking, could time keystrokes as the user needed. With a bit more hacking, the device could be made to brute-force passwords. What else would you do with this?

[flickr video=http://www.flickr.com/photos/adafruit/4504504976/ show_info=no]

19 thoughts on “SNES Controller + USB + Accelerometer

  1. Absolutely Fantastic. all it needs now is an OLED display in the middle and li-po cells for standalone use :)
    Whats the sample-rate of the accelerometer?
    Great Build!

    another use- make it work for the gameboys or smartphones :) jk

    or make it twitter when you “left” “right” “left” “right” “a” “b” “a” b””

  2. Perhaps it can be used to emulate Nintendo DS games as well! given that it can preform mouse movements, that’s just what you’d need to control the touch screen comfortably.

  3. I really liked this – not so much for the hack itself, but for the fact that there’s still someone other than myself who doesn’t pronounce the acronym “SNES” phonetically.

  4. this whole hack is fucking stupid its a fucking snes controller that is old and outdated with bad ergonomics that nobody cares about when everday much better wireless controllers exist

    sorry kirov is drunk

  5. @Notoriousalpha:
    Sega Genesis, Aladin; ABBA BAAB ABBA and BAAB ABBA BAAB. We found that cheat orselves and celebrated with too much playing, too much soda and way too many bags of candy.

    Good times.

  6. How do we use an accelerometer to brute-force passwords?

    You open the case of the PC, then grab the controller and make threatening motions like you’re going to whip the controller into the motherboard.

    If done correctly, the computer will give you the passwords out of fear.

    If it doesn’t know, it will give you what it thinks you want to hear. That’s what brought motherboarding, and other ‘advanced computer forensic techniques’ such as this, under scrutiny by the media.

  7. Hey Devlin, there’s a typo in the tutorial. It says that “The ADXL335 requires 5V power, so don’t connect it to VCC (5V) instead, we’ll use the 3V that the teensy provides”, when it should say that the ADXL335 requires 3V.

  8. That looks very cool. It’d be sweet to have a live-Linux distro on flash memory inside it that would boot into a bunch of emulators. You could start and play the emu’s with the same controller.

    @ChalkBored: 1 password per shake xD

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