Guitar Hero Robot Actually Shreds

Once a popular craze, most of the public has sold or stashed away their plastic video game instruments and forgotten the likes of Guitar Hero and Rockband. Having never been quite satisfied with his scores, [Nick O’Hara] set out to create a robot that could play a Guitar Hero controller. It would be easy enough to use transistors to actuate the buttons or even just a Teensy to emulate a controller and have it play the perfect game, but [Nick] wanted to replicate what it was really like to play. So after burning out a fair number of solenoids (driving them over spec) and learning on his feet, [Nick] slowly began to dial in his robot, Jon Bot Jovi.

The brains of the bot are a Raspberry Pi running some OpenCV-based code that identifies blobs of different colors. The video feed comes from a PS2 via an HDMI capture card. Solenoids are driven via an 8 channel driver board, controlled by the Pi. While it missed a few notes here and there, we loved seeing the strumming solenoid whammy rapidly on the strummer. All in all, it’s a great project, and we love the design of the robot. Whether played by a robot, turned into a synthesizer, or recreated from toy pianos and mechanical keyboards, Guitar Hero controllers offer many hacking opportunities.

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Guitar Hero Controller Gets A New Musical Life

Guitar Hero was a big deal, right up until it wasn’t. The best efforts of the video game industry couldn’t resurrect the once-off rush of enthusiasm for rhythm gaming, and thrift stores around the globe are now littered with little plastic instruments. [Analog Sketchbook] decided to give one of these guitars for the Wii a new life, repurposing it as a synth controller.

The build is a straightforward one, thanks to the prevalence of modern maker solutions to electronic problems. Hooking up to the guitar is a solved problem, with an Adafruit Nunchucky breakout board allowing the Guitar Hero controller to be connected via jumper wires to the Raspberry Pi’s IO pins.

Communication is via I2C, and is easy to work with in Pure Data, running on the Pi. [Analog Sketchbook] created a patch that runs a synthesizer, controlled by the buttons and controls on the guitar itself. With this setup, you could create any number of different routines to allow the guitar to be played differently. We’d love to see a chiptune-esque arpeggio patch, or something that plays fat FM synth tones a la the Genesis, but that’s just our opinion. The sky really is the limit here, with plenty of grunt on the Pi for various forms of synthesis.

It’s a fun build that gives new life to an otherwise forgotten gaming accessory. We’ve seen them repurposed before too, as far back as 2010. Video after the break.

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Reverse Engineering Guitar Hero

What do you do when a ten-year-old video game has a bug in it? If you are [ExileLord] you fix it, even if you don’t have the source code. Want to know how? Luckily, he produced a video showing all the details of how he tracked the bug down and fixed it. You can see the video below. You may or may not care about Guitar Hero, but the exercise of reverse engineering and patching the game is a great example of the tools and logic required to reverse engineer any binary software, especially a Windows binary.

The tool of choice is IDA, an interactive debugger and disassembler. The crash thows an exception and since [ExileLord] has done some work on the game before, he was able to find a function that was creating a screen element that eventually led to the crash.

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Guitar Hero Controller Built From Toy Guitar And Keyboard

frets-on-fire-custom-controller

[Heinrich Laue] was kind of a latecomer to the fake guitar playing video game phenomenon. He played Frets on Fire — an open source clone of the game — on PC and eventually bought a copy of Guitar Hero World Tour. But playing on the keyboard was a drag. Instead of buying a controller he built his own hacked Guitar Hero controller from a scrapped keyboard and a toy guitar.

The plastic toy he started with was screwed together. This is a really nice since it’s almost impossible to open toys that have been welded together. There was plenty of room inside for all his components and even some space to run the wires.

He started the electronic portion of the build by tracing out the keyboard matrix to figure out which solder pads he could tap into. The strum bar uses a door hinge with buttons on either side of it. When you move it back and forth it hits the buttons, with the spring mechanism in each returning it back to center. The fret buttons are keys from the keyboard, but the switches uses were pulled from a few computer mice. But the real innovation comes into play when he added the Star Power tilt sensor and whammy bar. Follow the link above to find out how he did it.

Controlling Your Webcam With An Old Guitar Hero Pedal

Hackaday reader [Tom Price] often uses Skype to communicate with family near and far, but he was getting tired of adjusting his webcam each time his kids moved out of frame. While the solution he came up with isn’t fully automated, it is hands-free, which is good enough for his purposes.

[Tom] was looking around for an electronic foot pedal of some sort when he came across a wireless 3rd party Guitar Hero peripheral that happened to fit the bill. Using an Arduino library created by [Bill Porter], he was quickly able to get the toy to communicate with an Arduino-flashed Atmega8, but things kind of fell flat when it came time to relay signals back to his computer. Using another Atmega8 along with the PS2X library, he was able to emulate the Guitar Hero controller that his foot pedal was looking for.

With the pedal portion of his project wrapped up, he focused on his webcam. [Tom] mounted the camera on a small servo, which he then wired up to the receiving end of his foot pedal rig. As you can see in the video below, he can now pan his camera across the room with a tap of his foot, rather than leaning in and manually adjusting it.

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Bass Hero Combines Guitar Hero With Dance Dance Revolution

 

Standing up to play Dance Dance Revolution type games is sooooo much work. Thankfully, [Jebadiah0001] is taking the strenuous exercise component out of the game by altering a guitar controller to play dancing games.

He’s calling it Bass Hero because the DDR games only use four inputs, reducing the guitar controller to four string buttons like an electric bass would have. His implementation uses a GameCube controller to connect to the console. He took it apart to get at the button connections. Each string button on the guitar is connected on one side to a button on the GC controller, the other side is a common connection. But instead of pulling those straight to ground, he routes that signal through the strumming actuator. This way the player can get the correct buttons ready, then strum at just the right time to complete the circuit.

It certainly makes the harder levels of DDR quite a bit easier. See for yourself in the video after the break.

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Guitar-mounted Camera Documents Your Guitar Hero-ness

[The Longhorn Engineer] wanted to record some of his virtual shredding sessions so he built this camera mount for a Guitar Hero controller. It holds the camera about a foot below the bottom of the controller, pointing up at the guitar and its player. Since the camera is held tightly to the guitar this produces an interesting effect of movement in the background while the foreground is completely stationary. He set out to complete the build using just one piece of acrylic and some fasteners but added an aluminum support piece because the prototype had a bit too much flex to it. The video after the break walks you through the design, the build process, and finishes with a test run.

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