Life Size Lancer Becomes Gears Of War Motion Controller

July 20, 2020 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Gears of War is a franchise famous for its giant gun with a big chainsaw on the front. [Eric] laid his hands on a toy replica, and decided it had to become a usable motion controller for the game.

The build is straightforward, following the usual format for motion controller builds. Fitted with a gyroscope and accelerometer, it’s interfaced to the PC using a microcontroller. The toy has a trigger which is hooked up to the fire button in game. Additional buttons were added to the shell for movement and other actions such as reloading and finding cover. As a nice final touch, the large pull handle on the left of the weapon is used to activate the chain saw in-game.

While it’s unlikely to be competitive with a mouse or even gamepad in practice, it’s hard to argue against the fun of wielding a full-size, 10-pound weapon when playing Gears of War 5. [Eric] has also shared a basic controller hacking guide for those eager to get into similar builds themselves. We’ve featured [Eric]’s work before, too – with this epic Minecraft pickaxe build. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Life Size Lancer Becomes Gears Of War Motion Controller” →

Can A 3D Printer Print Better Filament For Itself?

July 20, 2020 by Adil Malik 21 Comments

3D printed parts are generally no way near the strength of an equivalent injection moulded part and techniques such as a sustained heat treatment, though effective usually distort the part beyond use.

[CNC Kitchen] was investigating the results (video, embedded below) of a recent paper, that described a novel ABS filament reinforced by a “star” shaped Polycarbonate core, an arrangement the authors claim is resilient to deformation during the annealing process often necessary to increase part strength. While the researchers had access to specialised equipment needed to manufacture such a composite material, [CNC Kitchen’s] solution of simply using his dual extruder setup to directly print the required hybrid filament is something we feel, strongly resonates with the now old school, RepRap “print your printer” sentiment.

The printed filament seems to have reasonable dimensional accuracy and passing the printed spool through a heater block without the nozzle attached, ensured there would be no obvious clogs. The rest of the video focuses on a very thorough comparison of strength and deformation between the garden variety Polycarbonate, ABS and this new hybrid filament after the annealing process. Although he concludes with mixed results, just being able to combine and print your own hybrid filament is super cool and a success in its own right!

Interested in multi-material filaments? Check out our article on a more conventional approach which does not involve printing it yourself!

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Skee-Ball Scoring With Coin Slot Switches

July 20, 2020 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Bowling is great and all, but the unpredictability of that little ball jump in Skee-Ball is so much more exciting. You can play it straight, or spend a bunch of time perfecting the 100-point shot. And unlike bowling, there’s nothing to reset, because gravity gives you the balls back.

In one of [gcall1979]’s earlier Skee-Ball machines, gravity assisted the scoring mechanism, too: each ball rolls back to the player and lands in a lane labeled with the corresponding score, which is an interesting engineering challenge in its own right. He decided to build automatic scoring into his newest Skee-Ball machine.

At the bottom of each cylinder is an arcade machine coin door switch with a long wire actuator. These had to be mounted so they’re close enough to the hole, but out of the way of the balls.

Each switch is wired up to an Arduino Mega along with four large 7-segments for the score, and a giant 7-segment to show the number of balls played. Whenever the game is reset, a servo drops a door to release the balls, just like a commercial machine.

The arcade switches work pretty well, especially once he bent the wire into hook shape to cover more area. But they do fail once in a while, maybe because the targets are full-size, but the balls are half regulation size. For the next one, [gcall1979] is planning to use IR break-beam targets which ought to work with any size ball. If you prefer bowling, you won’t strike out with break-beam targets there, either.

A Portable Home Air Quality Meter With The ESP32

July 20, 2020 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Around the world, rolling pandemic lockdowns have left many working from home. [kn100] is in just such a predicament, and while spending nearly 24 hour a day in a residential flat, got wondering about air quality. Thus, it was time to build some gear to keep an eye on things!

Grafana may require a database and some work to set up, but the results are to die for.

The build consists of an ESP32 hooked up to a Bosch BME680 air quality sensor. It measures pressure, temperature, humidity and gas resistance, and then with a closed source library, uses this to calculate an “Air Quality Index” as well as estimate CO2 and VOC levels in the air. Data is passed from the ESP32 over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi. This runs Mosquitto for handling the MQTT queries, saving the data in an Influxdb instance. Grafana is then used to query this database and produce attractive graphs of the data.

It’s a build that not only helps keep an eye on things in the flat, but is great practice for building solid Internet of Things devices with top-notch data visualisation. We’ve talked about how to do this before, too – so if you need this capability in your life, there’s no excuse not to get hacking!

Finding The Random Seed Of Minecraft’s Title Screen

July 20, 2020 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Minecraft is a game about exploring procedure-generated worlds. Each world is generated from a particular “seed” value, and sharing this seed value allows others to generate the same world in their own game. Recently, the distributed computing project Minecraft@Home set about trying to find the seed value of the world shown in the Minecraft title screen, and have succeeded in their goal.

The amount of work required to complete this task should not be underestimated. 137 users contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs to the effort, finding a solution in under 24 hours. The list of contributors to the project is a long one. It appears the method to find the seed involved comparing screenshots from various seed worlds to the original image. This took a lot of reverse engineering in order to calculate the camera FOV and other settings of the original capture, such that the results could be compared accurately. Interestingly, the group found two seeds that can generate the requisite world, suggesting the world generator code has some collisions between seed values.

We’re not sure what’s more astounding, the amount of work that went into the project, or that there’s a distributed computing project tackling advanced Minecraft research. Either way, we’re no strangers to Minecraft hacks around these parts. Video after the break. Continue reading “Finding The Random Seed Of Minecraft’s Title Screen” →

There’s An Engineer In Germany I’d Like A Word With; Tale Of A Crumbling Volkswagen Lock

July 20, 2020 by Jenny List 149 Comments

In common with quite a few in the hardware hacking community, I have a fondness for older vehicles. My “modern” ride is an older vehicle by today’s standards, a Volkswagen Polo 6N made in the late 1990s. It’s by my estimation a Good Car, having transported me reliably back and forth across the UK and Europe for several years.

Last week though, it let me down. Outside the church in a neighbouring village the driver’s door lock failed, leaving me with my igniton key stuck in the door, and a mildly embarrassing phone call to my dad to bring the Torx driver required to remove the assembly and release it. I am evidently not 1337 enough, I don’t carry a full set of Torx bits with me everywhere I go. The passenger side lock has never worked properly while I’ve had the car, and this is evidently my cue to sort it all out.

Continue reading “There’s An Engineer In Germany I’d Like A Word With; Tale Of A Crumbling Volkswagen Lock” →

Ubuntu Update Hack Chat

July 20, 2020 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 22 at noon Pacific for the Ubuntu Update Hack Chat with Rhys Davies and Alan Pope!

Everyone has their favorite brands, covering everything from the clothes they wear to the cars they drive. We see brand loyalty informing all sorts of acquisition decisions, not only in regular consumer life but in technology, too. Brand decisions sort people into broad categories like Mac versus PC, or iPhone versus Android, and can result in spirited discussions of the relative merits of one choice over the others. It’s generally well-intentioned, even if it gets a bit personal sometimes.

Perhaps no choice is more personal in hacker circles than which Linux distribution to use. There are tons to choose from, each with their various features and particular pros and cons. Ubuntu has become a very popular choice for Linux aficionados, attracting more than a third of the market. Canonical is the company behind the Debian-based distro, providing editions that run on the desktop, on servers, and on a variety of IoT devices, as well as support and services for large-scale users.

To fill us in on what’s new in the world of Ubuntu, Canonical product manager Rhys Davies and developer advocate Alan Pope will stop by the Hack Chat this week. They’ll be ready to answer all your questions about the interesting stuff that’s going on with Ubuntu, including the recently announced Ubuntu Appliances, easy to install, low maintenance images for Raspberry Pis and PCs that are built for security and simplicity. We’ll also talk about snaps, desktops, and whatever else crops up.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 22 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. Continue reading “Ubuntu Update Hack Chat” →