Dealing With Fallout

November 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

In just a few short days, Fallout 4 will be released and a substantial portion of the Hackaday staff will be taking the day off. As you would expect, a lot of people with 3D printers, soldering irons, and far too much time on their hands are getting pumped for the Fallout release. Here’s a few Fallout builds we’ve found over the past few weeks:

Pip-Boys

The most iconic thing you’ll find in a Fallout game is the Pip-Boy, the UI for the player and a neat wrist-mounted computer (that somehow has a CRT in it, I guess) for the player’s character. Hackaday’s own [Will Sweatman] built his own Pip-Boy 3000 that’s completely functional. The build uses a 4.3 inch touch display, a 10 position rotary switch, and a bunch of 3D printed parts.

Elsewhere on Hackaday.io, [Karl] is working on a functional Pip-Boy controller for Fallout, and [cody] built one with a Raspberry Pi. Of course, if you’re super special and have two thousand dollars to blow, Bethesda released a limited-edition Pip-Boy edition of Fallout 4 that’s compatible with most cell phones.

The Not Pip-Boys

There’s more to Fallout than just wrist-mounted computers, and for the true aficionados, there are gigantic gear-shaped doors. [TreyHill] has a partially finished basement with a gaming room tucked behind his very own vault door. The door itself is built out of plywood and rolls along a gear rack mounted to the floor. Will it hold up to a nuclear blast? Probably not. Is it up to code? It looks cool, at least.

[Lilykill] on Thingiverse is extremely capable with a copy of solidworks and produced a bunch of 3D models from the Fallout universe that includes power armor, ray guns, more Pip-Boys, plasma grenades, and a Nuka-Cola truck.

Fallout 4 for the Apple II

Fallout 4 will be available for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, leaving out a large contingent of retro gamers. Fear not, lovers of the 6502: there’s’ a version for the Apple II:

This tribute to both the Apple II and Fallout was made with the Outlaw Editor, an SDK for pseudo-3D game development on exceedingly old hardware. There’s actual ray casting happening in this tribute, and it works just the same as Wolfenstein 3D or the like.

Hackaday Links: June 28, 2015

June 28, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

The iBookGuy is using CPU heatsinks to cool microwave dinners. It’s an old Pentium II heatsink and a modern fan, cobbled together into a device that can quickly and effectively cool down a microwave dinner. I have several heatsinks from some old Xeon servers in my kitchen, but I don’t use them to cool food; I use them to defrost food. It’s very effective, and now I need to get some data on how effective it is.

[juangarcia] is working on a 3D printable PipBoy – the one in the upcoming Fallout 4. The extra special edition of Fallout 4 include a PipBoy that works with your cellphone, but if you want one before November, 3D printing is the way to go.

[Collin] over at Adafruit is teaching Oscilloscope Basics. Note the use of the square wave output to teach how to use the controls. Also note the old-school DS1052E; the Rigol 1054Z is now the de facto ‘My First Oscilloscope’

[Donovan] has one of those V212 toy quadcopters. The remote has a switch that controls a bunch of lights on the quad. This switch can be repurposed to control a small camera. All it takes is some wire, an optocoupler, and a bit of solder. Very cool. Video here.

I go to a lot of events where hackers, devs, and engineers spend hours banging away on their laptops. The most popular brand? Apple. The second most popular brand for savvy consumers of electronics? Lenovo, specifically ThinkPad X- and T-series laptops (W-series are too big, and do you really need a workstation graphics card for writing some node app?). They’re great computers, classic works of design, and now there might be a ThinkPad Classic. With a blue Enter key, 7-row keyboard, a multi-color logo, ThinkLights, a bunch of status LEDs, and that weird rubberized paint, it’s a modern realization of what makes a ThinkPad great. Go comment on that Lenovo blog post; the designer is actually listening. Now if we could just get a retina display in a MacBook Air (the one with ports), or get manufacturers to stop shipping displays with worse than 1080 resolution…

Need a fan guard? Know OpenSCAD? Good. Now you have all the fan guards you could ever want. Thanks [fridgefire] for sending this one in.

Making Embedded GUI’s Without Code

December 5, 2014 by Will Sweatman 68 Comments

When the 4D Systems display first arrived in the mail, I assumed it would be like any other touch display – get the library and start coding/debugging and maybe get stuff painted on the screen before dinner. So I installed the IDE and driver, got everything talking and then…it happened. There, on my computer screen, were the words that simply could not exist – “doesn’t require any coding at all”.

I took a step back, blinked and adjusted my glasses. The words were still there. I tapped the side of the monitor to make sure the words hadn’t somehow jumbled themselves together into such an impossible statement. But the words remained… doesn’t.require.any.coding.at.all.

Continue reading “Making Embedded GUI’s Without Code” →

3D Printed Pip-Boy, Geiger Counter Not Included

July 1, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

pip

Yes, we all love portal guns and crowbars, but there’s one piece of video game paraphernalia that could conceivably be a useful piece of hardware for the modern technologist. It’s the Pip-Boy 3000, the wrist-wearable computer from Fallout, and now you can print on on your 3D printer.

All the pieces for this Pip-Boy are available over on Thingiverse. Included in those files are a dozen plastic parts that, when assembled, come together to form a wrist-mounted computer. You could, of course, print out a static image of a Pip-Boy screen for this build, but [dragonator] made a little addition to his model – he put in a space for a smartphone, so all your environmental sensors and inventory management also work with this 3D printed model.

This is far from the first wearable Pip-Boy we’ve seen, but it is the first that’s able to be fabricated on a 3D printer, and comes with the nice bonus of being the best phone case ever. It’s still a lot of work to put this together, but we’re going to say the results are fantastic.

You can check out the demo video of the Pip-Boy below.

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Fallout Brought To Life With This Working PIP-Boy 3000

September 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 39 Comments

working_pipboy_3000

[MyMagicPudding] wanted to try his hand at hobby electronics, so he decided to go all-in and build himself a PIP-Boy 3000. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the PIP-Boy 3000 is a wrist-mounted computer from the popular Fallout video game series.

The PIP-Boy is based around an HTC Desire HD mobile phone, which [MyMagicPudding] mounted inside case custom made for him by [Skruffy] from the Replica Prop Forum. He wanted to stay true to the game, so the wrist-mounted computer’s interface eschew’s the Desire’s touch screen and is instead controlled via a set of buttons and dials on its face. The external inputs all interface with the Desire via an Arduino Uno, which communicates with the phone using TCP over USB.

While he admits that his soldering skills are pretty dodgy, and that there’s no longer room behind the neat-looking facade to mount the PIP-Boy on his wrist, we think that it looks great. If this is an example of his first electronics project, we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Continue reading to see the PIP-Boy 3000 in action.

Continue reading “Fallout Brought To Life With This Working PIP-Boy 3000” →