There’s a thing that happens when you’re shopping at a second hand store. You know how it goes: You see an item that strikes your fancy, your mind immediately locks in, and the item just has to be yours. [Tom Tilley] experienced this when he saw a Paw Patrol kids toy at a local thrift store, and you can see the results of his holiday hacking sessions in the video below the break.
How did [Tom] put the Paw Patrol game to use? Looking like a motorcycle cockpit left him with few choices. Before long he’d flipped the game over over, pulled the innards, and hacked together what just might be the most perfect toy based interface we’ve seen lately.
Using a Raspberry Pi Pico controller and some careful surgery, [Tom] turned the Paw Patrol game into a controller for the 1987 Sega motorcycle race arcade game Super Hang-On. Watching [Tom] play is a blast, but just in case the whole thing is a losing prospect, it’s completely reversible as well!
Of course we were a little disappointed that Super Hang-On couldn’t make use of the paws button.
On the other end of the spectrum, here’s an actual car turned into a game controller. Got a hot controller hack to share? Be sure to let the Tip Line know!
While not terribly impressive, I’m still jealous that I didn’t think of doing this when I threw this toy away about a year ago. Although maybe I’m misremembering, but I could have sworn the handles twisted to act like a throttle. Either way, this toy had a tendency to go off at random when left on scaring the hell out of my little girls at night. One of the reasons we trashed it.
It was just some quick holiday fun and unfortunately the were fixed in place on this one. The on/off bone just has wipers that contact the PCB and it does seem to be a little unreliable so I can understand it going off randomly.
Be cool if it had counter steering at speed
Thrift stores are the best for projects like this.