[Joven] wrote in to show us his unique NES controller mod. He initially thought of just putting some flash storage in his controller like so many others. Then he got the idea to a security feature. You must first enter a code to access the memory. What code? Yes, that one. He chose the Konami code. As he notes, this may not be the wisest choice for security purposes, but it sure is cool. At least it isn’t controlling something that really would require security, like his door. You can see a video describing the project after the break.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/6991298]
You could always tell who had friends with that one.
That’s not much of a security feature, since you could always just hardwire power to the relay. Nevertheless, it’s cool.
I liked it
I think I would prefer to use DULLARD though.
@babble Ha! All your base are belong to us!
On a related note, this would be cool to use as some sort of door access system (if you could set up a timeout to prevent brute forcing). Another option would be to unplug the controller from the door (and carry it with you like a key). With the micro controller storing the last ten buttons even on a successful code entry, there’s a slight problem if someone ever gains read access to that array. But then again, I would go with a brute force attempt first knowing that you only have 8 buttons… we can infer that he’s pressing 10 buttons and then estimate that there are just over 1.073 billion options… given the UI, I would start the brute force at UUDDLRLRAB as a guess to try and shorten the number of combinations tried before success.
But who cares? This is up there with the external hard drive hidden in an old battery-less uninterrupted power supply. Nice work Joven.
Mixed feelings about this. on one hand, it’s an awful lot of trouble for just 1 gig, but i wouldn’t want to sacrifice a 16 or 32 gig until i tested it on a 1 gig. second, all it takes is a screwdriver and jumper wire and you can bypass the relay so it’s not very secure.
overall a wonderful start, i hope he moves it up to a larger storage of solid state drive and remolds the case and seals it with epoxy. this has a lot of potential
16GB USB flash drives are as little as £17.50 (play.com), got 3 of them, very nice & very fast.
If you want to prevent someone from easily just bypassing the code you could cover it all with epoxy – sure it wouldn’t prevent the most stubborn but it would stop it being easy.
Despite it not being very practical it’s a nice hack, and some of the best ones aren’t practical.
Very curious why he didn’t just cut out the matrix decoder and wire the buttons directly to a flash drive that already has a pushbutton lock feature (maybe because the controller has 8 buttons and those drives only have 4?). I cut out the decoder for my wireless NES controller mod to attach the buttons directly to wireless numeric keypad hardware.
Why a relay? Why not just run it off the arduino directly, or through a transistor? Not like it needs that much current…
Someone should take this a step further and incorporate a flash drive into a Simon game so you have to get X number of sequences correct before you get to use the drive.
@atrain: Most USB Thumbdrives will take upwards of 100mA when under full load (reading or writing). And, most microcontrollers can only source or sink +/-25mA.
As you suggest, a transistor would work, though wiring the power directly to the Arduino probably would not. A relay is a bit overkill, but maybe he wanted the satisfying click of it kicking in?
That click is quite satisfying to us old analog folk.
You could simulate the click with a small pizo speaker connected to the microcontroller…
Ow, stop throwing 500A contactors at me, analogue folk! ;)
hello
Pretty cool.
I wonder if there is enough room inside the case to add a usb hub so it could function as a flash drive and as an NES controller for your PC.
well if it works as a usb nes controller then a lot of people wont know it was a flash drive until they fire up an emulator and play contra.
This is a pretty cool idea for using your NES controller, although the flash drive is quite big.