Month: June 2008

PSP L2/R2 Button Mod

June 14, 2008 by 1 Comment


This is quickly becoming an unintentional “game controller Saturday”. We haven’t been covering the PSP much lately, so this is a treat. AcidMods forum member [Electro] put together a quick guide for adding two missing shoulder buttons to the PSP. The L2 and R2 buttons are used while playing Playstation 1 games and are usually mapped to directions on the joystick. This mod jumps the joystick’s contacts an relocates the buttons to the shoulders. The switches used in the post seem kind of bulky, but you’re free to use anything that fits.

[via Engadget]

X2Wii, NES/SNES/N64 To Wii Adapter

June 14, 2008 by 3 Comments


If you poke around [Raphaël]’s site, the creator of today’s featured hack, you’ll find a lot of interesting projects. X2Wii is an ongoing project to adapt controllers from earlier console generations so they work with the Wii’s GameCube ports. He adapted his Multiuse tiny1 which uses an ATmega8. The code is all assembly so the microcontroller can keep up with the protocol. Definitely check out [Raphaël]’s other project pages.

Exploit-Me Firefox XSS And SQL Scanning Addon

June 14, 2008 by 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbL2ptbjoSA&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
One of the best tools we saw at LayerOne was the Exploit-Me series presented by [Dan Sinclair]. Security Compass created these tools to help developers easily identify cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

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Ultraportable Laser Graffiti?

June 13, 2008 by 6 Comments


[Sittiphol Phanvilai]’s multitouch screen project was posted a couple different places today. It uses the Nokia N95 to track light pens and draws the resulting paths on the video output. We immediately saw the applications for this in laser tagging. Right now if you want to do laser tagging you need to haul a laptop with you in addition to the projector. With some modification to the NeuScreen software you could replace the laptop with just cellphone plugged directly into the projector.

Multiband Nixie VU Meter

June 13, 2008 by 4 Comments


This VU meter project by [Daniel Naito] is a great piece of Russian electrocouture. It’s made up of 14 Nixie tubes that display seven frequency bands for the two audio channels. He found this similar project, but wanted to keep the cost low by avoiding such exotic ICs. First, the two input channels are amplified and then split using seven bandpass filters covering 60, 150, 400, 1000, 2500, 6000, and 15000Hz. Then, the AC audio is converted to DC. The final stage converts the logarithmic scale to a linear output. Besides the semirare Nixie tubes, the majority of the parts are just cheap opamps and comparators. The post is an excellent read and you can see it in action in the video below.

UPDATE: Yep, it’s a repost. I’m awesome like that. The True RMS Plasma Vu-meter seems to be new to us though.

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UPCB Makes Your Arcade Stick Universal

June 13, 2008 by No comments


The Universal PCB project lets you make any controller (specifically arcade sticks) console agnostic. A PIC microcontroller is used to translate between the button presses and the signals for the specific console you’re connected to. It uses a DB15 for the external plug. The PIC knows which console you’re plugged into based on which pins are high or low in your console specific adapter cable. The board includes a piggyback plug so you can plug in an Xbox360 controller board (like the one above) since the console requires authentication. The PIC’s firmware is conveniently upgradeable over the USB cable.