NES Zapper: Improved With Lasers

September 9, 2016 by 12 Comments

The Zapper gun from the original Nintendo was ahead of its time. That time, though, was around 30 years ago and the iconic controller won’t even work with most modern televisions. With a little tinkering they can be made to work, but if you want to go in a different direction they can be made to do all kinds of other things, too. For example, this one can shoot green lasers and be used as a mouse.

The laser pointer was installed in the gun using a set of 3D printed rings to make sure the alignment was correct. It’s powered with a Sparkfun battery pack and control board which all fit into the gun’s case. The laser isn’t where the gun really shines, though. There’s a Wiimote shoved in there too that allows the gun to be used as a mouse pointer when using it with a projector. Be sure to check out the video below to see it in action. Nothing like mixing a little bit of modern Nintendo with a classic!

The Wiimote is a great platform for interacting with a computer. Since the Wii was released it’s been relatively easy to interface with them via Bluetooth. One of the classic Wiimote hacks is using an IR pen and projector to create a Smart Board of sorts for a fraction of the price. They’ve also been used with some pretty interesting VR displays.

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NES Light Gun Fires Awesome Laser Effect

August 31, 2016 by 26 Comments

[Seb Lee-Delisle]’s NES lightgun gave us pause as the effect is so cool we couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it at first. When he pulls the trigger there erupts the beam of light Sci Fi has trained us to expect, then it explodes in a precision sunburst of laserlight at the other end as smoke gently trails from the end of the barrel. This is a masterpiece of hardware and trickery.

seb-lee-delisle-nes-zapper-trick-thumb
Demo video posted by @seb_ly

The gun itself is a gutted Nintendo accessory. It looks like gun’s added bits consist of two LED strips, a laser module (cleverly centered with two round heatsinks), a vape module from an e-cigarette, a tiny blower, and a Teensy.  When he pulls the trigger a cascade happens: green light runs down the side using the LEDs and the vape module forms a cloud of smoke in a burst pushed by the motor. Finally the laser fires as the LEDs finish their travel, creating the illusion.

More impressively, a camera, computer, and 4W Laser are waiting and watching. When they see the gun fire they estimate its position and angle. Then they draw a laser sunburst on the wall where the laser hits. Very cool! [Seb] is well known for doing incredible things with high-powered lasers. He gave a fantastic talk on his work during the Hackaday Belgrade conference in April. Check that out after the break.

So what does he have planned for this laser zapper? Laser Duck Hunt anyone? He has a show in a month called Hacked On Classics where this build will be featured as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

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200W Laser Bazooka Is Just Silly

June 30, 2016 by 79 Comments

We weren’t going to run this one, because, well, it’s just ridiculous. But enough of you have browbeat us by sending in tips to the tipline that we’re going to capitulate. We’re not going to name you all by name, because really, you should be ashamed of yourselves. But you know who you are!

[Styropyro] does a lot of crazy things on YouTube. We really liked his “stuff in a microwave oven” series. He’s also obsessed with lasers and popping black balloons. So he took the laser heads out of four DLP computer projectors (the ones with 24 of those 1.5W Nichia diodes) and combined them. Yup, 200W of 405 445nm blue.

Then he just straps them together and passes them through a lens. It’s not a tight beam, but this thing is really bright. Even though the beam is very loosely focused, it burns stuff. That’s about all you can say. Lots of laser. Boy Howdy!

OK, there, we ran it. Don’t do this at home. It doesn’t require much finesse, and it’s going to get someone blind. Much better to expend your efforts on something more civilized like a projector. At least then you can play vector games on the wall. And stay off my lawn!!! (Kids these days…)

For those that do want to burn stuff, [Joshua Vasquez] published an article yesterday about building a safe laser cutter… much more worth your energy than anything billed as a laser bazooka.

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Corkscrew LASER “Hologram”

December 8, 2015 by 18 Comments

If you watch much science fiction, you know that in the future, there’re plenty of 3D holographic displays. From Princess Leah’s distress call to the Star Trek holodeck, there’s no shortage of computers that can make realistic images. It might not be up to holodeck standards, but [freedscript] created a 3D display for an Arduino using a chopstick, a motor, some paper, and a LASER. Of course, it isn’t actually a hologram, but neither is half the stuff you see on TV (Star Trek’s holographic characters were disturbingly solid for standing waves). The display is a type of volumetric display.

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Automated laser turret

Building An Automated Laser Turret Targeting System

August 25, 2015 by 11 Comments

Last year, [Alvaro] built a laser turret robot for the DEFCONBOTs competition. It worked pretty well, but this year, he decided to step it up a notch. Now instead of moving the entire robot laser array, he’s using galvanometers to move only the laser — he’s essentially built a mini laser projector.

A galvanometer is basically a very sensitive ammeter that moves — it can also be used as a very precise electro-mechanical actuator, for say, moving a tiny mirror. As you can imagine, you can actually build home-made galvanometers — but it’s really not that easy. Instead, [Alvaro] opted to order a few laser show controllers on eBay, and hack his way to a solution — we approve.

Wiring up the galvanometers and making some circuitry for them was the easy part. The tricky part is automating the system.

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Cheap Projector Tells Time, Invades Space

August 12, 2015 by 14 Comments

Building a video projector isn’t something that most people do casually, but [Dominic Buchstaller] isn’t most people. As part of an ongoing street art  project, he built a rather neat scrap video projector/bedside lamp/clock device he calls Great Balls of Fire. It is made from a Nokia cell phone screen and a small projector mechanism, mounted inside a frosted glass light sphere.

One of the most interesting parts of the build is the projector mechanism. Rather than build one from scratch or tear apart an expensive Pico projector, [Dominic] found another source: a cheap car logo projector from eBay. These are designed to show a car manufacturer logo on the ground when you open your car door. It came with all of the parts he needed, including an LED light source and optics. He tore that apart and replaced the car logo with the phone screen, creating a very cheap projector. It isn’t that bright, but it is bright enough that when he mounted it inside the glass sphere, it could project the time and the odd space invader. It’s a great example of how sometimes it makes sense to look for a cheap solution rather than a free one: buying the car logo projector saved him a lot of hassle in building the optics. [Dominic] was also responsible for this awesome old-school tube radio hack, where he replaced the guts of an old radio with an internet radio player.

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Teardown Of Intel RealSense Gesture Camera Reveals Projector Details

July 29, 2015 by 23 Comments

[Chipworks] has just released the details on their latest teardown on an Intel RealSense gesture camera that was built into a Lenovo laptop. Teardowns are always interesting (and we suspect that [Chipworks] can’t eat breakfast without tearing it down), but this one reveals some fascinating details on how you build a projector into a module that fits into a laptop bezel. While most structured light projectors use a single, static pattern projected through a mask, this one uses a real projection mechanism to send different patterns that help the device detect gestures faster, all in a mechanism that is thinner than a poker chip.

mechanism1It does this by using an impressive miniaturized projector made of three tiny components: an IR laser, a line lens and a resonant micromirror. The line lens takes the point of light from the IR laser and turns it into a flat horizontal line. This is then bounced off the resonant micromirror, which is twisted by an electrical signal. This micromirror is moved by a torsional drive system, where an electrostatic signal twists the mirror, which is manufactured in a single piece. The system is described in more detail in this PDF of a presentation by the makers, ST Micro. This combination of lens and rapidly moving mirrors creates a pattern of light that is projected, and the reflection is detected by the IR camera on the other side of the module, which is used to create a 3D model that can be used to detect gestures, faces, and other objects. It’s a neat insight into how you can miniaturize things by approaching them in a different way.