Fight A Minotaur With This Gorgeous Handheld

June 19, 2017 by 4 Comments

[Jason Carlson]’s favorite game as kid was 1983’s Treasure of Tarmin by Intellivision, a maze game that eventually came to be called Minotaur. As an adult there was only one thing he could do: remake it on a beautiful Arduino-based handheld.

[Jason] built the handheld out of a small-footprint Arduino Mega clone, a 1.8” LCD from Adafruit, a 5 V booster, a 1” speaker and vibe motor for haptic feedback. There are some nice touches, like the joystick with a custom Sugru top and a surprisingly elegant 2 x AA battery holder — harvested from a Yamaha guitar.

The maze maps are all the same as the original game, which [Jason] found online, but he stored the maps as bytes in an array to speed up the game—there was a flicker in the refresh already. However he added a progress map so players could see every area that was explored. In addition to Minotaur [Jason] also added remakes of Tetris, Simon and Snake, simpler games he wrote to test out the hardware.

We’ve published a bunch of handheld gaming projects over the years, including putting a Pi Zero in a GameBoy, building a throwback handheld, and playing Ocarina of Time on a N64 handheld.

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The Immersive Flight Simulator From 1989

June 19, 2017 by 18 Comments

The history of PC gaming showers games such a Wolfenstein 3D and Doom with the honor of having the most advanced graphics of the day. Often overlooked is Microsoft Flight Simulator and earlier, pre-Microsoft versions from subLOGIC, including the 1977 Apple II version. [Wayne Piekarski] was playing around with MS Flight Simulator 4 recently, and wanted it to be a bit more like his modern flight sim based on X-Plane 11. That meant multiple monitors, and the results are amazing.

The video and networking capabilities for MS Flight Sim 4, while very impressive for the late 80s, are still very limited. In 1989, computers only supported a single display, and while FS4 had the ability to network machines together for dogfighting, there was no way to set the camera viewpoint to the remote aircraft.

The solution to this problem came in the form of memory dumps. Since [Wayne] is running FS4 in DOSBox, he’s able to read the memory of one instance of the game, and write those memory locations to another instance of the game. There were only 18 bytes of memory in the instance of DOSBox that included heading, altitude, roll, and pitch information for the simulated aircraft. [Wayne] is sending this data to other instances of FS4 — effectively mirroring the game on another machine — and changing the camera view to look out the left and right windows. He displayed those views on additional monitors, and was done.

The results are exactly what you would expect. [Wayne] is now taking off from Meigs Field and buzzing the ten or twelve buildings in downtown Chicago with a panoramic 180° view. Check out the videos of that in action below.

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Twenty IoT Builds That Just Won $1000 In The Hackaday Prize

June 19, 2017 by 19 Comments

Today we’re excited to announce the winners of the Internet of Useful Things phase of The Hackaday Prize. The future will be connected, and this is a challenge to build devices connected to the Internet that are useful. These projects are the best the Internet of Things have to offer, and they just won $1000 each and will move on to the final round of the Hackaday Prize this fall.

Hackaday is currently hosting the greatest hardware competition on Earth. We’re giving away thousands of dollars to hardware creators to build the next great thing. Last week, we wrapped up the second of five challenges. It was all about showing a design to Build Something That Matters. Hundreds entered and began their quest to build a device to change the world.

There are still three more challenges to explore over the next few months. So far, the results have been spectacular. The winners for the Internet of Useful Things portion of the Hackaday Prize are, in no particular order:

Internet of Useful Things Hackaday Prize Finalists:

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How To Build Your Own Convertible (For Under $500)

June 19, 2017 by 44 Comments

It’s a common sight in the farming areas of the world — a group of enterprising automotive hackers take a humble economy car, and saw the roof off, building a convertible the cheapest way possible. Being the city dwelling type, I always looked on at these paddock bashing antics with awe, wishing that I too could engage in such automotive buffoonery. This year, my time would come — I was granted a hatchback for the princely sum of $100, and the private property on which to thrash it.

However, I wasn’t simply keen to recreate what had come before. I wanted to take this opportunity to build a solution for those who had suffered like me, growing up in the confines of suburbia. Surrounded by houses and with police on patrol, it simply isn’t possible to cut the roof off a car and drive it down to the beach without getting yourself in altogether too much trouble. But then again, maybe there’s a way.

The goal was to build the car in such a way that its roof could be cut off, but remain attached by removable brackets. This would allow the car to be driven around with the roof still attached, without raising too much suspicion from passing glances. For reasons of legality and safety, our build and test would be conducted entirely on private property, but it was about seeing what could be done that mattered.

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DIY Shortcut Keyboard

June 19, 2017 by 17 Comments

Working with CAD programs involves focusing on the task at hand and keyboard shortcuts can be very handy. Most software packages allow the user to customize these shortcuts but eventually, certain complex key combination can become a distraction.

[awende] over at Sparkfun has created a Cherry MX Keyboard which incorporates all of the Autodesk Eagle Shortcuts to a single 4×4 matrix. The project exploits the Arduino Pro Mini’s ability to mimic an HID device over USB thereby enabling the DIY keyboard. Pushbuttons connected to the GPIOs are read by the Arduino and corresponding shortcut key presses are sent to the host machine.

Additional functionality is implemented using two rotary encoders and the Teensy encoder library. The first knob functions as a volume control with the push-button working as a mute button. The encoder is used to control the grid spacing and the embedded button is used to switch between imperial and metric units. The entire code, as well as the schematic, is available on GitHub for your hacking pleasure. It’s a polished project just ready for you to adapt.

The project can be extended to be used with other computer software such as Gimp and the keys may be replaced by capacitive touch sensors making it more sturdy. Bluetooth can be added to make things wireless and you can check out the Double Action Keyboard to extend functionality further. Continue reading “DIY Shortcut Keyboard” →

The Arduino Foundation: What’s Up?

June 19, 2017 by 65 Comments

The Arduino Wars officially ended last October, and the new Arduino-manufacturing company was registered in January 2017.  At the time, we were promised an Arduino Foundation that would care for the open-source IDE and code infrastructure in an open and community-serving manner, but we don’t have one yet. Is it conspiracy? Or foul play? Our advice: don’t fret. These things take time.

But on the other hand, the Arduino community wants to know what’s going on, and there’s apparently some real confusion out there about the state of play in Arduino-land, so we interviewed the principals, Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto, and asked them for a progress report.

The short version is that there are still two “Arduinos”: Arduino AG, a for-profit corporation, and the soon-to-be Arduino Foundation, a non-profit in charge of guiding and funding software and IDE development. The former was incorporated in January 2017, and the latter is still in progress but looks likely to incorporate before the summer is over.

Banzi, who is a shareholder of Arduino AG, is going to be the president of the Foundation, and Musto, AG’s CEO, is going to be on the executive board and both principals told us similar visions of incredible transparency and community-driven development. Banzi is, in fact, looking to get a draft version of the Foundation’s charter early, for comment by the community, before it gets chiseled in stone.

It’s far too early to tell just how independent the Foundation is going to be, or should be, of the company that sells the boards under the same name. Setting up the Foundation correctly is extremely important for the future of Arduino, and Banzi said to us in an interview that he wouldn’t take on the job of president unless it is done right. What the Arduino community doesn’t need right now is a Foundation fork.  Instead, they need our help, encouragement, and participation once the Foundation is established. Things look like they’re on track.

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Intel Discontinues Joule, Galileo, And Edison Product Lines

June 19, 2017 by 195 Comments

Sometimes the end of a product’s production run is surrounded by publicity, a mix of a party atmosphere celebrating its impact either good or bad, and perhaps a tinge of regret at its passing. Think of the last rear-engined Volkswagens rolling off their South American production lines for an example.

Then again, there are the products that die with a whimper, their passing marked only by a barely visible press release in an obscure corner of the Internet. Such as this week’s discontinuances from Intel, in a series of PDFs lodged on a document management server announcing the end of their Galileo (PDF), Joule (PDF), and Edison (PDF) lines. The documents in turn set out a timetable for each of the boards, for now they are still available but the last will have shipped by the end of 2017.

It’s important to remember that this does not mark the end of the semiconductor giant’s forray into the world of IoT development boards, there is no announcement of the demise of their Curie chip, as found in the Arduino 101. But it does mark an ignominious end to their efforts over the past few years in bringing the full power of their x86 platforms to this particular market, the Curie is an extremely limited device in comparison to those being discontinued.

Will the departure of these products affect our community, other than those who have already invested in them? It’s true to say that they haven’t made the impression Intel might have hoped, over the years only a sprinkling of projects featuring them have come our way compared to the flood featuring an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. They do seem to have found a niche though where there is a necessity for raw computing power rather than a simple microcontroller, so perhaps some of the legion of similarly powerful ARM boards will plug that gap.

So where did Intel get it wrong, how did what were on the face of it such promising products fizzle out in such a disappointing manner? Was the software support not up to scratch, were they too difficult to code for, or were they simply not competitively priced in a world of dirt-cheap boards from China? As always, the comments are open.

Header image: Mwilde2 [CC BY-SA 4.0].