Year: 2012

Nintendo Light Gun Retrofit Lets It Play Color-based Games

October 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

This Nintendo light gun, aka Zapper, looks like a stock device. But a peek inside shows that the circuit board has been replaced. [CNLohr] added USB functionality and a few extra sensors that let him write his own games for that use the classic controller.

After cracking open the case he measured the shape of the circuit board so that he could recreate it exactly. This let him design his own board that would drop right into the same plastic support pieces as the original. His circuit uses an ATmega8u2 to provide a USB connection and read the attached sensors. One interesting aspect is the group of four long traces that act as an expandable i2c bus. [CNLohr] went with this so that he could use daughter boards to add in sensors later. In the demonstration seen after the video he’s using a photodiode as a color sensor. It allowed him to write the color-based game seen above where you shoot a different color of target in each round.

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IPad External Battery Case Forced To Work With A Non-iPad Tablet

October 2, 2012 by 10 Comments

[Carnivore] uses a Pipo Max M1 tablet. It’s an Android device that is very responsive thanks t the 1.6 GHz dual-core processor and it runs Jellybean (latest version of Android OS). The one thing he wasn’t so happy with is battery life. Under heavy load it lasts about three hours. When reading an eBook that use can be stretched to 10 hours. His solution was to add an external battery. It turns out the 9.7″ screen makes the body of the device almost exactly the same size as an iPad, so he made an iPad external battery case work with the Android tablet.

[Carnivore] started the hack by disassembling an iP6000 case which houses a 6000 mAh battery. He removed the dock connector and fitted in a 2.5mm power jack. Luckily the buttons on the Android tablet are in nearly the exact same place as those on an iPad, with the power button hole needing just a bit of enlargement. The case charges itself and the tablet’s internal battery using a microUSB port which means he no longer needs to carry around a special power cord. The new hardware increased the battery life by about 75%.

Whatever A Phobia Of Fingers Is Called, This Is It.

October 2, 2012 by 96 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LSXvhLKjCU&w=470]

Touched is a project by [Rebecca Strauss] that integrates servos, strings, and felt into a horrifying kinetic sculpture made up of a dozen mechanical fingers straight from a Boschian nightmare.

The fingers are made up of segments of wood articulated with the help of a small string. Each pair of fingers is controlled by a single servo, and the tips of each pair of fingers is controlled by a second servo.

After covering them in felt, [Rebecca] wrapped conductive thread around each of the fingers. When some of the fingers are touched, they all recoil as if controlled by a demon living just under a mountain of felt.

[Rebecca] brought in another kinetic sculpture using her servo controlled fingers; in the video up at the top and after the break, you can see the inner workings of this floor-mounted version. When the IR proximity sensor goes off, the fingers recoil but can be coaxed out again by gently stroking one of the phalanges.

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Nixie Suduku And On-die LEDs

October 2, 2012 by 18 Comments

The best booths at Maker Faire draw you in with something unbelievably cool or ridiculously absurd, and bring out a state-of-the-art technology just as your curiosity for the main feature starts to wane. [John Sarik]’s booth for a class he’s TAing at Columbia – Modern Display Science and Technology – is one of these booths.

The main feature of the booth is a suduku board filled with 81 Nixie tubes. As shown in the video below, you control the cursor (the decimal point of the Nixies) with a pair of pots. After moving the cursor to the desired location, there’s a keypad to change the number at any one of the 81 locations on a suduku puzzle.

[John]’s presentation then continued to what he’s working on up at Columbia: he’s working on a project to put arrays of LEDs onto silicon, just like any other integrated circuit. He demoed a small LED display built in to a DIP-40 package with a glass (or maybe quartz) window. Yes, it’s a really tiny LED matrix display with a pixel pitch probably much smaller than a traditional LCD display.

Video of the suduku machine after the break, as well as a gallery of the LED matrix on a chip. The matrix was very hard to photograph, so if [John] would be so kind as to send a few more pics in, we’ll be happy to put them up. There’s also a proper video from [John]’s YouTube showing off the Nixie Suduku puzzle solving itself with a recursive algorithm.

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Escape From New York: Hackaday Edition

October 2, 2012 by 14 Comments

Woo we’re home from Maker Faire! The Hackaday boss man [Caleb] and [Scott], [Phil], and [Andrew] from Squidfoo are back in Springfield, Missouri. I’m safely back in the bosom of Appalachia in Pensyltucky, and we hope every one else at Maker Faire NYC 2012 made it back home safely.

Don’t think this is the end of our coverage of Maker Faire, though. Honestly, the Internet situation was terrible at Maker Faire, and between tethering on my droid and a MiFi, I was lucky to post what I did. There’s more stuff coming down the pipe, and now that I have a decent connection we’ll be posting more videos to the Hackaday YouTube channel.

Of course this wouldn’t be a proper Hackaday post without a hack, therefore I will humbly submit something I discovered around the Delaware Water Gap: Every GPS unit has a setting to avoid New Jersey. All you have to do is enable the ‘avoid toll roads’ setting. Yes, it’s an easy modification to preserve your health and sanity, lest you accidentally find your way into a suburban swampland.

Picking Locks With Toool

October 1, 2012 by 35 Comments

What Maker Faire would be complete without teaching children the joys of jiggling and twisting locks until they’ve opened? Toool, the open organisation of lockpickers made their way to New York this weekend to show off their bumping skills and get the kids interested in manipulating small mechanical devices.

The guys from Toool had a very cool setup – just a bunch of tables and chairs with a few picks and torsion wrenches. There were a few classic Master Locks on the table, but also a series of six tumbler locks each labeled with a number 1 through 6 signifying how many pins were in the lock. The idea is to get someone started on a one-pin lock, and eventually have them work their way up to the full six pins.

In the video after the break, one of the more animated guys from Toool explains why they were there, and also shows off picking a Master Lock twice in under 30 seconds. Seriously, people: educate yourself on locks before buying one.

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Using A 555 Timer And ADC As A Random Seed

October 1, 2012 by 15 Comments

Most toolchains for embedded system include support for random number generation. But if you’ve read the manual you’ll know that this is really just pseudo random number generation (PRNG). When calling this function the same numbers will always return in the same order unless a different random number seed is supplied in advance. [Gardner] put together a simple and cheap solution for deriving better random number seeds. He reads a voltage from a 555 timer using the ADC on the microcontroller. At first glance it may not seem like a great source of randomness, but he performed some testing and the results look quite promising.

The project is aimed at Arduino-based circuits, but any chip with an ADC will work. The 555 timer is used as a free running oscillator. We know that this not be very stable when compared to even the worst of crystal oscillators, but that’s what makes it work so well as a random seed source. Add to this the low parts count and small size of the additional circuitry and you’ve got a winning combination. So keep this in mind when you need a random number but don’t necessarily need rock solid entropy.

[via Reddit and Freetronics]