Xbox Controller Mod Gets Serious About Stick Drift

January 5, 2021 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

Many a gamer has found that after a few years of racing around the track or sending demons back from whence they came, the analog sticks on their trusty controller can start to drift around. Many times it’s a fairly minor problem, something you might only notice if you were really keeping an eye out for it, but it can definitely be annoying. Those handy with a soldering iron might just swap out the sticks for replacements once it gets to that point, but [Taylor Burley] wondered how difficult it would be to recalibrate the ailing sticks instead.

To be clear, [Taylor] acknowledges this approach is overkill. It would be cheaper and easier to just replace the drifting stick with a new one. Even if you take into account that new sticks might not be as high quality as the originals and could give up the ghost faster, this probably isn’t worth the effort. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting hack.

In the video after the break, [Taylor] starts by explaining how stick drift occurs in the first place. Each axis of the stick is physically connected to the wiper of a potentiometer, so for 10K pots, the stick’s center point should correspond to a resistance of 5K. He then goes on to measure the resistance in a bad joystick, and sure enough, the center resistance is off by several hundred Ohms.

To fix this, he comes up with a simple circuit that places additional potentiometers between the wipers. With two joysticks and two adjustment pots per axis, that makes eight little adjustment wheels that need to be fiddled with to get the center points calibrated properly. In this case [Taylor] uses a controller diagnostic tool for the Xbox to quantify the impact his adjustments are making so he can dial it in perfectly, but the idea is the same no matter who’s logo is on the box.

We’d say this is the most overkill attempt at addressing the issue of stick drift on gaming controllers we’ve ever seen, but that title has to go to [Matteo Pisani], who replaced the analog stick on his Switch Joy-Con with a custom circular touchpad.

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AI On The Highway

January 5, 2021 by Chris Lott 13 Comments

A couple of announcements caught our attention last week regarding AI-controlled cars. South Korea’s Kakao Mobility and local startup Autonomous A2G launched a limited self-driving taxi service in Sejong City this month, made possible by enabling legislation passed in May. For now, the service is restricted to government employees, and the AI driver will be backed-up by an engineer who is there to monitor the systems and take over in an emergency. The companies plan to expand the fleet and service areas this year, although no details are given.

Another announcement comes from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport about the on-going successes of the semi-autonomous truck platooning program. This is a collaboration between the Korean Expressway Corporation, Kookmin University in Seoul, and Hyundai Motors. Previously restricted to a designated test road called the Yeoju Smart Highway, the program is now being tested on public roads at speeds up to 70 kph. This year the program will expand to platoons of 4 trucks running at 90 kph. We’ve always thought that long-haul trucking and freight industries would be an early adaptor AI technologies, and one which AI could offer significant benefits.

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Burned Out SKR E3 Mini Gets New Stepper Driver

January 5, 2021 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

It didn’t take long to figure out that a dead X axis and an message saying “TMC CONNECTION ERROR” meant that one of the stepper drivers on the SKR E3 Mini 3D printer control board had released the magic smoke. Manufacturer BigTreeTech replaced the board under warranty, and the printer was back up and running in short order. But instead of tossing it in the trash, [Simon] wondered how hard it would be to repair the dead board.

Removing the original stepper driver IC.

The short answer is, not very hard. There was no question as to which of the four TMC2209 drivers was shot, since the X motor was the only one experiencing a problem. The drivers unfortunately aren’t socketed on this board, but after a little kiss with the hot air, the old chip was off.

[Simon] didn’t have any spare TMC2209 chips, but the TMC2208 has the same pinout and is a drop-in replacement. The TMC2208 is rated for a bit less current, but it shouldn’t be a problem under normal circumstances.

Other than the stepper connector getting a little toasty during the installation, the swap went off without a hitch and the board was up and running again. [Simon] ended up putting the now repaired SKR E3 Mini in his Ender 3; a nice 32-bit upgrade compared to the ATmega1284 that was originally running the show. Though in the past, he’s managed to squeeze a bit more performance out of the older 8-bit board as well.

The Last Component Storage System You’d Ever Need

January 5, 2021 by Kristina Panos 38 Comments

Think you’ve seen the best component storage system? This system could only be better if you could walk up and talk to it. [APTechnologies] was tired of using a hodgepodge of drawers and boxen for storing their components. What they needed was an all-purpose solution for storing all kinds of small-to-medium-sized goodies, be they through hole or SMT.

This one happens to have a software interface as well that is searchable with short, crisp expressions that find parts by ID or with parameters. It’s a Python 3 script running on a Raspberry Pi 4B that’s hiding behind the HDMI display. [APTechnologies] printed a special arm for that, and you can find all the files on GitHub. Not only does the LED above the corresponding drawer light up, it lights up in a color that represents the inventory levels. We assume green/yellow/red, but [APTechnologies] doesn’t specify.

Don’t know what to do with some of your components? If they’re really old, they may be no good anymore. It just depends.

Remoticon Video: Meta_Processing Is A Mashup Of Text And Block Programming

January 5, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Very few people want to invent the universe before they blink their first LED. Sure, with enough interest a lot of folks will drill-down to the atomic level of technology and build their way back up. But there’s something magical about that first time you got your blinky to blink, and knowing how to write makefiles plays no part in that experienc). Now apply that to projects using smartphone as wireless interfaces… how simple can we make it for people?

Meta_Processing can translate the instructions into any of 14 languages

Jose David Cuartas is working to answer that very question and gives us a guided tour of his progress in this Meta_Processing workshop held during the Hackaday Remoticon. Meta-Processing is an IDE based on — as you’ve probably guessed — Processing, the programming language that unlocked higher-level functionality to anyone who wanted to perform visually-interesting things without becoming software zen masters. The “Meta_” part here is that it can now be done with very limited typing and interchangeably between different spoken languages.

The approach is to take the best of text programming and block programming languages and mash them together. In that way, you don’t type new lines, you add them with a click of the mouse and select the instruction you want to use on that line from a list. It means you don’t need to have the instructions memorized, and avoids typos in your code. The docs for that instruction will be shown on the bottom bar of the IDE to help you with parameters. And the kicker is that since you’re selecting the instructions, choosing any of the IDE’s 14 available spoken languages will update your “code” with translations into the new language.

In the workshop, video of which is included below, Jose demonstrates a number if interesting examples including audio, video, and user input, using a surprisingly small amount of code. The IDE even spawns a server on the network so that the apps you’ve written can be loaded by a smartphone. It has support for communicating with Arduino-compatible devices with digital read/write, analog read, and servo control. There’s even a fork of the project called Meta_Javascript that rolls in the ability to work with REST-like APIs.

People learn in many different ways. Having options like this to help people get to blinky very quickly is a great way to break down barriers to understanding and using computers.

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Inputs Of Interest: DecaTxt Ultra-Portable Chording Keyboard

January 5, 2021 by Kristina Panos 33 Comments

Now here’s a stocking stuffer of a keyboard. The DecaTxt is the size of a deck of cards, and at first glance it looks like some kind of pocket Keno machine or other gambling or gaming apparatus. But that’s just because it’s so colorful. When you only have ten keys emulating a full keyboard, there’s bound to be some serious labeling going on, as there should be.

The DecaTxt is a Bluetooth 4.0 chording keyboard that’s meant to be used with your phone or whatever you want to pair it with. It was originally called the In10did, which stands for Input Nomenclature Ten Digit Interface Device. Catchy, no? At some point in the last ten years, this little guy went wireless and got a cooler name — the DecaTxt. Continue reading “Inputs Of Interest: DecaTxt Ultra-Portable Chording Keyboard” →

New Micro YARH.IO Designed For Skilled Operators

January 5, 2021 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

A few months back we brought you word of the YARH.IO, an extremely impressive Raspberry Pi portable that featured rugged good looks and a unique convertible design made possible by a removable keyboard. One of the most appealing aspects of the design was that everything was built from off-the-shelf modules; it only took a couple jumper wires and some scrap perfboard to get everything wired up inside the 3D printed enclosure.

The downside of this construction style was that the finished product was a bit chunkier than was strictly necessary. But that’s not the case with the new YARH.IO Micro. The palm-sized portable looks almost exactly like the original, though it had to ditch the removable keyboard in the shrinking process. Gone as well is the touch pad, though with the touch screen capabilities of the Pimoroni Hyper Pixel four inch IPS display, that’s not much of a problem.

What’s the catch? Well, at a glance we can tell you this one is considerably harder to build. For one thing, you’ll need to remove the Ethernet and USB connectors from the Pi 3B+. The USB ports get relocated, but Ethernet understandably has to be left on the cutting room floor. Nothing to worry about with the GPIO pins, the display takes up all of those, but you’ll probably want to wire the I2C lines to the female header on the side of the case so you can add external hardware and sensors.

You also need to nestle an Arduino Pro Micro in there to communicate status information about the battery to the operating system over I2C. If you wanted to save a little wiring you could probably leave off the DS3231 RTC module, but it depends on how often you’ll be able to sync up with NTP.

While it may be more difficult to assemble than its predecessor, it’s certainly not unapproachable. Once again, no custom PCBs or exotic components are required. You might be doing a lot more soldering (and desoldering) than you would have before, but it’s nothing that the average Hackaday reader isn’t capable of. For your troubles, you’ll get a exceptionally portable Linux machine that’s ripe for hacking and modification.

If the time and effort it will take to put together a YARH.IO is a bit more than you’re willing to invest right now, there’s always commercial alternatives like the DevTerm. But whether you go with the original or this new Micro edition, we think the satisfaction of having built the whole thing yourself will be more than worth it.