Kill Time Making Flappy Bird, Not Playing It

January 30, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 12 Comments

With all the Flappy Bird clones floating around in the ether after the game’s unexpected success, there are some that are better than others. And by better, we mean, hacked together from misc hardware. If you’ve got an Arduino on hand, then you’re half way to making your own:

The “Minimalist” Version

[aron.bordin] created his own Flappy Bird game with a short list of parts some of us likely have lying around on our bench. An Arduino loaded with the appropriate code is wired to a 16×16 LED matrix, which apparently displays the minimal amount of visual information you’d need to play the game. The only other parts required are a single pushbutton and resistor tethered on a breadboard to control your flapping. With the wire hookup laid out by convenient diagrams and the libraries required for the code all found on the same page, this is easily something one could bang out in an afternoon. If afterwards you still find yourself with more time to kill than you can stand to play Flappy Birds, there is always the option of fashioning a humorously-sized cell phone case to squeeze it all into… which we’d like to see.

The “Fancy” Version

If you want more resolution than solid colored LEDs, or you just have a fondness for the terrifying bird abstraction the game is known for, you can switch out the 16×16 matrix for a Nokia LCD screen. [Huy’s] rendition of this build over on Hackaday.io will deliver a “more detailed” graphic for the game, and is still roughly just as easy to assemble. Similarly, an Ardunio is loaded with the smarts required to generate the game, along with a single pushbutton tacked on for control. The code and the daunting (/sarcasm) two steps needed to wire the Arduino to the screen can be found on his project’s page.

If you must kill boredom playing Flappy Bird, there is no excuse not to do so on something you made yourself.

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Hacklet 32 – LED Persistence Of Vision Displays

January 30, 2015 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

Blinking LEDs are good. Moving, spinning things are good too. Put them both together and you get a Persistence of Vision (POV) display. Hackers have been building these displays for years. This week’s Hacklet focuses on some of the best LED POV displays on Hackaday.io!

We start with [EduardoZola] and POV as you type, write on the air. [Eduardo] used an Arduino Nano, a pair of 433 MHz radios, some blue LEDs and a motor to create a simple spinning display. A hall effect sensor keeps everything in sync. The entire display is powered by a 500 mAh LiPo battery. The awesome thing about this display is the interactive aspect. The transmitter module connects to a laptop via an on-board USB to serial converter. Typing into any serial terminal sends the text directly to the POV display, where the letters appear to hang in the air.

Next up is [boolean] with Silent Orchestra POV aka “Death Ring”. [boolean] didn’t want to just create a POV ring, he wanted a huge 5 foot diameter display for his local Burning Man decompression. Death Ring is an aluminum ring spun by a 3HP motor. A hall effect sensor keeps everything synced up, and keeps Death Ring’s 3 horsepower motor in check. Light is provided by a PixelPusher and WS2812 RGB strips. The system is designed to be interactive, controlled with a Leap Motion controller or a Microsoft Kinect. An MPU-6050 keeps acceleration in check while processing maps video to the LED strip. An Arduino Yun allows the entire system to be controlled via WiFi. [boolean] and his team have taken Death Ring through several revisions. Judging by the quality of their aluminum welding though, they’re on the right track to an awesome end result!

Hackaday.io power user [Davedarko] has been working on a POV display of a different sort. His Locomatrix is an 8×8 LED matrix which moves in and out on the Z axis. [Dave] originally created Locomatrix as his entry in the 2014 Hackaday Prize. We have to admit this is the first time we’ve seen this sort of display, but the idea is sound. In fact, [Bruce Land] posted in the comments to let [Dave] know that he’d seen a similar technique used with a CRT display back in 1964. We’re betting Dave’s 3D printed gears and LED matrix display will be more robust than a CRT tube slamming two and fro at several hundred pulses per minute!

Finally, we have Hackaday’s own [Mike Szczys] with CPOV – a Crappy Persistence of Vision display . CPOV is a proof of concept made from upcycled parts which [Mike] threw together in a couple of hours. He grabbed the motor from an old cassette deck, some plywood, perfboard, and of course LEDs to build his display. The processor is an ATtiny2313 running Adafruit’s MiniPOV 3 firmware. The system display doesn’t have a sync input, so [Mike] uses a novel form of Human-in-the-loop PWM control to keep the motor speed in check. CPOV is proof that Hackaday.io isn’t just for polished projects, but for proof of concepts, fails, and just plain research. Even if your project isn’t perfect, documenting it will help you learn from it. It might even inspire someone else to move forward and continue where you left off!

Want more POV goodness? Check out our new POV display list!

Our LEDs are going dim, so that’s about all the time we have for this Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Interactive Projections Take Miniature Golfers To A Tiny World

January 30, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 3 Comments

Miniature golf is one of those pastimes that can be molded and redefined pretty much indefinitely. Like pinball machines which also come in an endless variety of flavors, each hole of a miniature golf course is a vignette with a theme designed to tie cleverly into its objective. Mini golf has come a long way from windmills and draw-bridges, and with technology thrown in the mix you end up with works of art like [Dan Rosenfeld’s] project, “Sleepwalkers” which go so far as to paint a holographic world for the player to interact with.

“Sleepwalkers” was commissioned by Urban Putt, a chain that accommodates for dense city spaces by building their courses indoors. Designed specially for its location, the hologram acts as a narrative told by tiny characters living within the walls of the historic building the golf course occupies. At a certain point during the game, a player is prompted to purposely place their ball into an opening in one of the old walls where it quickly rolls somewhere out of sight. When the player peeks through a series of holes dotted throughout the surface in order to find where it went, they discover another world sandwiched between wood beams and insulation. This becomes the setting of a short exchange with a character who the player must interact with in order to get their ball out of hock. The spectral glow and dimensionality of the wall’s inhabitants is created using a projection along with the Pepper’s Ghost illusion, a classic trick with angles and mirrors. Once the player’s hand enters into the Sleepwalker’s world through larger holes in the wall, a camera used for depth cues maps the projection to its presence. The tiny figure then uses the hand in a series of dioramas as a tool to climb on in order to reach the area where the player’s ball is trapped. After a joint effort, a linear actuator and sensor help to complete the illusion that the projected character is pushing the golf ball free into the real world where the player can then retrieve it and continue on to the next hole.

The traditional antics created by swinging pendulums and spinning windmills will always charm us, but the use of technology to take us into a new world will leave us with something more. You can see it on the faces of those interacting with [Rosenfeld’s] installation for the first time:

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Casing Up The Teensy SDR

January 30, 2015 by Mike Szczys No comments

[Rich, VE3MKC] has made a lot of progress on his Software Defined Radio (SDR) which is based on a Teensy. His latest update shows off the hardware in an enclosure and a few new features.

When we looked at this in April of last year it was pretty much a proof-of-concept with components hanging loose from jumper wires. The new case mounts everything securely in a plastic Hammond enclosure with copper clad for the front and rear panels. The SoftRock SDR unit was yanked from its case and retrofitted with connectors to make it swappable for other units.

A little help goes a long way and [Rich] thanks his friend [Loftur, VE2LJX] for contributing numerous code improvements and feature additions which can be viewed in the repository. Check out the video below where these features are shown off.

In its present state the radio draws 80 mA at 12V in receive mode. It doesn’t transmit yet but we’ll keep our eyes open for another update on that. [Rich] plans to populate the input circuitry and write the transmit code next.

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Digitally Controlled Circuit Bending

January 30, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Circuit bending doesn’t get a lot of respect around some parts of the Internet we frequent, but there is certainly an artistry to it. Case in point is the most incredible circuit bending we’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s soldering wires to seemingly random points on a PCB, but these bend points are digitally controlled, allowing a drum machine to transform between bent crunchiness and a classic 1980s drum machine with just a few presses of a touch screen controller.

All circuit bending must begin with an interesting piece of equipment and for this project, [Charles], the creator of this masterpiece of circuit bending, is using a Roland TR-626, a slightly more modern version of the TR-606, the percussive counterpart of the infamous TB-303. The circuit is bent in the classical fashion – tying signals on the PCB to ground, VCC, or other signals on the board. [Charles] then out does everyone else by connecting these wires to 384 analog switches controlled by an Arduino Mega. Also on the Arduino is a touch screen, and with a slick UI, this old drum machine can be bent digitally, no vast array of toggle switches required.

[Charles] has put up a few videos going over the construction, capabilities, and sound of this touch screen, circuit bent drum machine. It’s an amazing piece of work, and something that raises the bar for every circuit bending mod from this point on.

Thanks [oxygen_addiction] and [Kroaton] for sending this one in.

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Easier UART To 1-Wire Interface

January 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

The 1-Wire protocol is usually found in temperature sensors, but you’ll also find it in chips ranging from load sensors, a battery sensor and LED driver that is oddly yet officially called a ‘gas gauge’, and iButtons. It’s a protocol that has its niche, and there are a few interesting application notes for implementing the 1-wire protocol with a UART. Application notes are best practices, but [rawe] has figured out an even easier way to do this.

The standard way of reading 1-Wire sensors with a UART is to plop a pair of transistors and resistors on the Tx and Rx lines of the UART and connect them to the… one… wire on the 1-Wire device. [rawe]’s simplification of this is to get rid of the transistors and just plop a single 1N4148 diode in there.

This would of course be useless without the software to communicate with 1-Wire devices, and [rawe] has you covered there, too. There’s a small little command line tool that will talk to the usual 1-Wire temperature sensors. Both the circuit and the tool work with the most common USB to UART adapters.

Reverse Engineer Then Drive LCD With FPGA

January 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Fans of [Ben Heck] know that he has a soft spot for pinball machines and his projects that revolve around that topic tend to be pretty epic. This is a good example. At a trade show he saw an extra-wide format LCD screen which he thought would be perfect on a pinball build. He found out it’s a special module made for attaching to your car’s sun visor. The problem is that it only takes composite-in and he wanted higher quality video than that offers. The solution: reverse engineer the LCD protocol and implement it in an FPGA.

This project is a soup to nuts demonstration of replacing electronics drivers; the skill is certainly not limited to LCD modules. He starts by disassembling the hardware to find what look like differential signaling lines. With that in mind he hit the Internet looking for common video protocols which will help him figure out what he’s looking for. A four-channel oscilloscope sniffs the signal as the unit shows a blue screen with red words “NO SIGNAL”. That pattern is easy to spot since the pixels are mostly repeated except when red letters need to be displayed. Turns out the protocol is much like VGA with front porch, blanking, etc.

With copious notes about the timings [Ben] switches over to working with a Cyclone III FPGA to replace the screen’s stock controller. The product claims 800×234 resolution but when driving it using those parameters it doesn’t fill the entire screen. A bit more tweaking and he discovers the display actually has 1024×310 pixels. Bonus!

It’s going to take us a bit more study to figure out exactly how he boiled down the sniffed data to his single color-coded protocol sheet. But that’s half the fun! If you need a few more resources to understand how those signals work, check out one of our other favorite FPGA-LCD hacks.

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