Fan And Vent Holes Prevent Sweaty Gaming Hands

April 11, 2011 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

[Happy Dragon] grew tired of wiping moist palms on his pants during intense gaming sessions. To combat the issue he tried adding a fan to an Xbox 360 controller that he had sitting around. He pulled a small PC fan from a Nyko Airflow and glued it over a hole he cut into the battery compartment of the controller. This forces air into the body of the unit, which exits through holes he’s drilled in the wings. He added an external battery pack to power the controller since the original batteries were removed before the fan was glues in place. The fan itself isn’t powered from this external pack, but requires a USB connection that he attaches using the disconnect from a wired Xbox controller.

After some testing, [Happy Dragon] seems… happy… with the results. He tells us that his hands are not sweaty, and that he finds he’s not gripping the controller quite as tightly as he used to so as not to block the vent holes. We can see a couple of issues with this design, like the holes filling up with crud, or the fan blowing dust and dirt into the controller (we’re thinking about the analog sticks). But perhaps a future design could create dedicated ducts inside that keep the electronics isolated from the cooling. Or maybe the exhaust from portable console builds could be used in a similar way?

You’ll notice that there’s no direct link for this hack. [Happy Dragon] didn’t write a post about this, he just sent us a half-dozen images and his description of the project. Check out the rest of the pictures after the break.

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Doom II On Epaper Display

April 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

We love to see Doom ported to new hardware because it usually means that someone has found a way around the manufacturer’s security measures. But the most exciting thing for us to see this time is that Doom II is played on an epaper display. These are notorious for slow refresh rates, but as you can see in the video after the break, this one achieves an admirably fast page redraw.

According to a translation of the original forum post, the PocketBook 360° Plus boasts a 5″ E Ink Pearl screen, 533 MHz Freescale i.MX35 ARM11 processor, 128 Mb of RAM, 2 gigs of storage, and WiFi. No word on price for one of these babies as it seems they’ve not yet been release. Remind anyone of the green monochrome goodness from the original Game Boy?

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Are Phones With Haptic Feedback In Our Future?

April 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Can we do away with a keypad and just squeeze our phones to check messages and dial contacts? [Sidhant Gupta] has been researching the idea of an electronically adjustable spring mechanism that might just make this possible. He calls the prototype above the SqueezeBlock. If you pick it up and give it a squeeze you can feel springs pushing back against your fingers, but it’s all a trick. Inside you’ll find one motor with a gear that converts the linear motion into a rotating force. Attached to the same axle as that gear are a motor and a rotary encoder. A microcontroller monitors that encoder to detect a user squeezing the two plates together, then drives the motor to vary the resistance. [Sidhant] outlines some possible uses that included stiffer resistence as unread email starts to pile up, or squeezing the device to its smallest size to turn the ringer volume all the way down.

We’re a little skeptical of this functionality in handhelds just because of the power consumption issue. But if that is somehow overcome we think this would make a pretty interesting phone feature… at least at first. Click through the link above for a video demonstration or get the details from the research presentation (PDF)

[Thanks Dan]

Webcam Images Processed And Played Back On LED Display

April 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Mathieu] has bee working to refine the code running on an LED matrix, and added some neat display tricks along the way. He wanted to make the display directly addressable from a computer. The 96×64 bi-color LED display is powered by an Atmel FPSLIC and already used double-buffering. Enabling a PC to write directly to one of the buffers was not too hard, requiring just a bit of optimization to get the timing right. From the look of the video after the break, he nailed it.

The video feed is generated from a webcam stream using Matlab to process each image. Just 50 lines of code captures a frame, sizes it appropriately, converts the result to black and white for edge detection, then finishes the job by compressing image data for transmission to the embedded processor. We’d like to say it’s easier that it sounds but we’re pretty impressed with this work. The display manages about 42 Hz with the current setup.

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Hackaday Links: April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Sunlit LCD screen

[A.J.] did some experiments and managed to replace his LCD backlight using fiber optics and the sun.

Game Boy LCD Repair

[Alan] found that he could fix dead columns on his Game Boy LCD screen with a little reflow work on the connector.

3DS Design Flaw?

Anyone having problems with the way their Nintendo 3DS closes? [Jeroen] noticed that his screen touches the other half of the device when closed. He added rubber feet to protect it, but we wonder if anyone else has noticed this issue?

Mac TP dispenser

This one takes iLife to a new level. Never poop without Apple’s consent again thanks to this Macintosh toilet paper dispenser. [Thanks Rob]

Children are the future

Here’s a heart warming way to end; [Bret] is teaching his 5-year-old son to solder. There’s a video that is sure to put a smile on your face. You’ll remember [Bret] (aka [FightCube]) from the adjustable prank box, a few 555 timer contest submissions, and several other hacks. We expect big things from your progeny!

According To Pete – New Online Video Series

April 9, 2011 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

This is [Pete Dokter], the fourth employee that Sparkfun ever had and currently Director of Engineering there. As you can see, they’re not letting [Peter] come out of his hole. Instead of designing new breakout boards they’ve given him a camera that he’ll be using to record his occasional pontifications. ‘According to Pete’ will become a regularly occuring online show where he answers questions from around the Internets. We’ll admit that the first episode, embedded after the break, is a bit content thin – serving only as an introduction. But we think [Pete] has a pleasant manner and we look forward to what blossoms out of this modest beginning.

We’ve long been fans of engineering-oriented online shows such as [Dave Jones’] EEVBlog, [Bill Hammack’s] The Engineer Guy, A collaboration between [Chris Gammell, Dave Jones, and Jeff Keyzer] call The Amp Hour, [Jeri Ellsworth’s] A-Z Videos and her upcoming series, [Ben Heck’s] The Ben Heck Show…. and we could go on.

With offerings like these you don’t need to wait for traditional TV to transition to IP delivery. Just stop watching crap and start watching these interesting shows.

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Kequencer 2.0 Is Cheaper And Easier To Build — Still Awesome

April 9, 2011 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Rich Decibels] decibels received so much interest in his original sequencer build that he decided to make another one that was a bit easier and less expensive to replicate. The original design, called the Kequencer, featured a nicely finished look for the user interface. For the Keyquencer 2.0 he decided that adding a lid to the enclosure meant not spending quite as much for controls (nice looking knobs tend to increase the cost of potentiometers).

A rectangle of protoboard serves as the panel face for the device. It looks like he painted it black on top so that it doesn’t distract from the neatly organized parts layout. He used point-to-point wiring to make most of the hookups, but he did create a board layout which will help to guide you when the number of wires starts to get out of hand. This was made after the fact and he regrets not having it for the initial build. Check out the demonstration video embedded after the break to hear how the second iteration sounds.

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