Author: Zoe Skyforest

3746 Articles

Wii-Inspired Controller Built Using Raspberry Pi Pico

January 1, 2024 by 2 Comments

We all thought Nintendo was going to change the world of gaming when it released the Wii all those years ago. In the end, it was interesting but not really fundamentally life-changing for most of us. In any case, [Sebastian] and [Gabriel] decided to build a Wii-like controller for their microcontroller class at Cornell.

The build uses a pair of Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers, communicating over HC-05 Bluetooth modules. One Pico acts as a controller akin to a Wiimote, while the other runs a basic game and displays it on a screen via VGA output. The controller senses motion thanks to a MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, combining both gyros and accelerometers in all three axes.

The duo demonstrate the hardware by using it as a pointer to play a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game. It’s in no way going to light up the Steam charts, but the project page does go into plenty of useful detail on how everything was implemented. If you want to create your own motion gaming controller, you could do worse than reading up on their work.

We’ve seen some other great examples of motion controls put to good use, like this VR bowling game. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Wii-Inspired Controller Built Using Raspberry Pi Pico” →

Frog Boy Color Reimagines The Game Boy Color Hardware From The Ground Up

December 31, 2023 by 13 Comments

Sales figures suggest Nintendo did pretty well with the Game Boy Color during its original run, even if the hardware and visuals feel a tad archaic and limited today. [Chris Hackmann] has taken the Game Boy Color design and reworked it from the ground up as the Frog Boy Color, kitting it out with modern upgrades in a GBA-like form factor while retaining the original hardware underneath.

[Chris] went to the wide-style GBA layout for comfort, which he considers superior to the original rectangular Game Boy format. He iterated through over 50 3D-printed enclosure designs to get the design to work, ensuring that the final housing could be CNC machined. He then set out to trim down the original Game Boy Color circuit layout to cut out hardware he considered unnecessary. The original LCD driver could go, since the Q5 replacement LCD he intended to use didn’t need it, and he also considered the IR port to be surplus to requirements. He also set out to replace the original audio amp with his own stereo design.

The result is a wide-format Game Boy Color with a gorgeous modern LCD, USB-C charging, and excellent compatibility with original games and accessories. Files are on Github if you want to build one yourself. Of course, he’s not the only person working on building the best Game Boy ever, but we always love seeing new work in this space. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Frog Boy Color Reimagines The Game Boy Color Hardware From The Ground Up” →

Raspberry Pi Pico Becomes Emotionally-Aware Music Visualizer

December 31, 2023 by No comments

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the nascent world of digital music was incredibly exciting. We all cultivated huge MP3 collections and spent hours staring at the best visualizers Winamp and Windows Media Player had to offer. [Rafael] and [Eric] decided to bring back those glory days with their music visualizer that runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

The design is quite interesting, going beyond the usual simplistic display of waveforms and spectrograms. Instead, the Pi Pico uses a Fast Fourier Transform analysis to determine the frequencies of the music, ideally then to determine the key, and thus the mood, of the tune.  Then, the visualizer uses different colors to represent those moods, such as green for happy music in a major key, or deeper blues for a sad piece in a minor key. The output of the visualizer is via Bruce Land’s 8-bit color VGA library, which allows the Pi Pico to drive a monitor directly.

Whether the visualizer really gets the music is up for debate.  The visuals simply don’t look sad and depressing enough when listening to Hallelujah, but maybe that’s just the lack of Jeff Buckley’s vocals in the instrumental. Furthermore, getting an FFT analysis to pull out reliable musical information from an audio recording is finicky to say the least. In any case, the blocky and colorful animations are nice to watch nonetheless. They’d make an excellent basis for visuals at your next underground chiptune show, that much is for certain. Video after the break.

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DIY Tube Lights Look Amazing For Just $50 A Piece

December 31, 2023 by 8 Comments

It’s the future. We should have weird glowy lights everywhere, all over our homes, cars, and businesses. In the automotive world, luxury automakers are doing their part with LED ambient lighting systems, but the rest of us have to step up. [Super Valid Designs] has developed an excellent modular DMX lighting rig that’s fit for this purpose; the rest of us just have to get to work and build our own!  (Video, embedded below.)

The design relies on hot-swapping powered bases that let a variety of different lights to be swapped in as needed. They use a custom four-pin socket designed by [Super Valid Designs] using PVC and ABS plumbing and conduit parts and tent pole springs from Home Depot. There’s a 3D-printable version, too, which is useful for those around the world that can’t get access to American standard gear easily. Anyone from the Nerf scene will understand this frustration well.

The real cool part of the modular rig, though, are the tube fixtures. There’s a ball design too, but they don’t look quite as future-cool as the tubes. They use fluorescent tube protectors as a cheap source of clear tubes, and use plumbing and conduit parts to make easy-insert connectors for pairing with the modular bases. Light is courtesy of old-school non-addressable RGB LED strips, attached to flat aluminium trim with their own adhesive combined with a wrap of clear packing tape as well. The LED strip is attached to one side of the tube, with parchment paper layered inside the tubes to act as a diffuser.

Building in quantities of 8 or more, [Super Valid Designs] reckons that the tubes can be built for $50 each or less. Of course, that adds up to a few hundred dollars in total, but the results speak for themselves.

If you’re thinking of tackling this project, but DMX is beyond your current skillset, fear not. We’ve got just the primer to get you started! Video after the break.

Continue reading “DIY Tube Lights Look Amazing For Just $50 A Piece” →

Localizing Fireworks Launches With A Raspberry Pi

December 30, 2023 by 103 Comments

If you have multiple microphones in known locations, and can determine the time a sound arrives at each one, you can actually determine the location that sound is coming from. This technique is referred to as sound localization via time difference of arrival. [Kim Hendrikse] decided to put the technique to good use to track down the location of illicit fireworks launches.

The build is based on the Raspberry Pi, with [Kim] developing an “autonomous recording unit” complete with GPS module for determining their location and keeping everything time synchronized. By deploying a number of these units, spread out over some distance, it’s possible to localize loud sounds based on the time stamps they show up in the recording on each unit.

Early testing took place with an air horn and four recording units. [Kim] found that the technique works best for sounds made within the polygon.  Determining the location was achieved with a sound investigation tool called Raven Lite, developed by Cornell University. The process is very manual, involving hunting for peaks in sound files, but we’d love to see a version that automated comparing sound peaks across many disparate recording units. In any case, it worked incredibly well for [Kim] in practice. Later testing with friends and a network of six recorders spread over Limburg, Netherlands, [Kim] was later able to localize fireworks launches with an accuracy down to a few meters.

Similar techniques are used to locate gunshots, and can work well with pretty much any loud noise that’s heard over a great distance. If you’ve been using your hacker skills to do similar investigative work, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

Audio Synthesizer Hooked Up With ChatGPT Interface

December 25, 2023 by 15 Comments

ChatGPT is being asked to handle all kinds of weird tasks, from determining whether written text was created by an AI, to answering homework questions, and much more. It’s good at some of these tasks, and absolutely incapable of others. [Filipe dos Santos Branco] and [Edward Gu] had an out of the box idea, though. What if ChatGPT could do something musical?

They built a system that, at the press of a button, would query ChatGPT for a 10-note melody in a given musical key. Once the note sequence is generated by the large language model, it’s played out by a PWM-based synthesizer running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Ultimately, ChatGPT is no musical genius. It’s simply picking a bunch of notes from a list that are known to work together melodically; that’s the whole point of musical keys. It would have been wild if it generated some riffs on the level of Stairway to Heaven or Spontaneous Devotion, but that might be asking for too much.

Here’s the question, though. If you trained a large language model, but got it to digest sheet music instead of written texts… could it learn to write music in various genres and styles? If someone isn’t working on that already, there’s surely an entire PhD you could get out of that idea alone. We should talk!

In any case, it’s one of the more creative projects from the ever-popular ECE 4760 class at Cornell. We’ve featured a bunch of projects from the class over the years, and noted how the course now runs on the RP2040. Continue reading “Audio Synthesizer Hooked Up With ChatGPT Interface” →

Building A Rad Super Capacitor RC Plane

December 25, 2023 by 16 Comments

[Tom Stanton] is a fan of things like rubber band planes, and has built many of his own air-powered models over the years. Now, he’s built a model powered by a supercapacitor for a thoroughly modern twist on stored-energy flying toys.

It’s not a wholly original idea; [Tom] was inspired by a toy he bought off-the-shelf. His idea, though, was to make one that could be hand-cranked to charge it to make it more like the rubber-band planes of old. He thus built his own geared generator for the job using a big pile of magnets and 3D printed components. It’s capable of putting out around 17 volts when cranked at a reasonable speed. Hooked up to the toy plane, his hand-crank generator was able to fully charge the plane in just a few turns.

His generator was really overkill for the small toy, though. Thus, he elected to build himself a much larger supercapacitor-powered model. He wired up a pack of six supercapacitors in series, designed for roughly 18 volts. The pack was given balance leads to ensure that no individual capacitor was charged beyond its 3.0 V rating. The pack was placed inside a nice aerodynamic printed fuselage. The plane was then given a brushless motor and prop, speed controller, servos, and an RC receiver. Indeed, far from a simple throwable model, it’s a fully flyable RC plane.

The plane is quite a capable flyer with plenty of power, but a fairly short run time of just under two minutes. Though, with that said, it can be recharged in just about that same amount of time thanks to its supercapacitor power supply. [Tom] reckons it should be capable of a 1:1 crank time to flight time ratio in ideal conditions.

Supercapacitors are super cool, but we don’t see enough of them. They’ve popped up here and there, and obviously have many important applications, but we’re not sure they’ve had a real killer app in the consumer space. XV Racers were killer fun, though. Continue reading “Building A Rad Super Capacitor RC Plane” →