Pong Playing Robot

February 2, 2009 by 11 Comments

[vimeo=1564591]

Sometimes, it can be very difficult to find a partner to play pong. Lets face it, pong just isn’t worth playing alone. Someone has come up with the perfect solution, a robot built specifically for playing pong. It watches the “ball” with a web cam and presses the appropriate buttons on the keyboard with its tentacle like arms. It is vaguely reminiscent of the switchboard operators from Men In Black, and definitely overkill for the job. You may notice there seems to be some performance issues with their game of pong. I doubt that the game itself is that taxing, but the same computer is controlling the robot as well.

Generating G-code With Common Lisp

February 1, 2009 by 10 Comments

gcode

Ruin & Wesen are a two person shop creating specialized music gear. As part of their recent MIDI Command development, they got into case manufacturing. They purchased a mini CNC mill to cut the aluminum cases. Unhappy with the software options provide [Wesen] decided to write his own G-code generator. G-code is part of the numerical control used to command CNC machines. He implemented his interpreter using the language he’s most familiar with: Common Lisp (not surprising if you notice the website’s backend). The post covers the design philosophy used and some of the problems that came up. We look forward to future releases since the interpreter can generate milling code using processing.org sketches and cut PCBs directly from Eagle.

You may remember Ruin & Wesen from when they shared their Eagle layout videos.

[Thanks fbz]

Eye-Fi Teardown

February 1, 2009 by 44 Comments

eye-fi

[les robots] had a defective Eye-Fi card on his hands and when a replacement was sent, he was told to destroy the original. What better way to ‘destroy’ something than opening the case? The Eye-Fi is an SD card with a builtin WiFi radio so it can upload images while remaining in camera. One version uses Skyhook’s location service to geotag photos. You can see a few photos of the dismantled card on Flickr. The board is manufactured by Wintec. The wireless side is handled by Atheros’ ROCm, the same low power Radio-on-Chip module you would find in a mobile phone. The flash memory comes from Samsung and the antenna is along the back edge, where it has the best chance of getting signal.

Wireless Genesis Controller For PC

February 1, 2009 by 13 Comments

wireless_gen

[Jacob] wanted to play some sega games on his PC and felt like the experience just wasn’t complete while using the keyboard for input. He had an old MadCatz controller laying around, which could have probably been connected fairly simply, but he really wanted it to be wireless. A wireless keyboard was sacrificed, and the wireless genesis controller was born. To make it, he disassembled the keyboard to take the controller chip out. After tracing out and soldering switches to the leads, he installed it in his genesis controller.

FiSSION 3D Game Engine For Wii Homebrew

January 31, 2009 by 36 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd1DrN2PDt4]

[PunMaster] wrote in to tell us that he has just released the first public demo of FiSSION Project. It’s a homebrew 3D game engine for the Wii. He’s hoping it will make development easier for other people that want to get into the Wii hacking scene. The project was originally spun out of similar work he was doing targeted at XNA for the 360. This is just a demo to generate interest in the project and hopefully get some feedback as to what’s needed to make a full release possible.

PS3 Ubuntu Install For Emulation

January 31, 2009 by 15 Comments

snes9x

Gizmodo has done us all a favor by wading through many forum posts and condensing them into a handy guide to installing Ubuntu on your Playstation 3. It covers some of the caveats of going this route. You have to backup all of your game data before starting since the system repartitions the drive. Ubuntu installs without any problem, but because the cell processor is a PowerPC architecture it means not everything has been ported to it. There are a few things you need to install to get the Sixaxis controller to be recognized as a joystick. Super Nintendo emulator SNES9X is available and works, mostly. It doesn’t support fullscreen and cries if you reconfigure the buttons.

Supporting developers through alternate operating systems isn’t new to Sony. With the original Playstation, they released Net Yaroze, a consumer grade dev kit. The Playstation 2 was the first time they officially supported Linux on a game console (our first Linux machine). The ground breaking thing about the Playstation 3 was bundling in Linux support with every single console; no specialized hardware needed. Unfortunately they’re not near as open with the PSP.

Surface Mount Soldering In Depth

January 31, 2009 by 5 Comments

smd

[doctek] wants to help ease any fear you may have of surface mount design. He has written this extremely in depth explanation of how to design and build an LED driver composed of surface mount parts. While there has been plenty of surface mount instruction floating around for a while, he feels that they skimp on the details, especially when it comes to really tiny parts who’s pads are unreachable with a soldering iron.  The method he uses is the “hot plate” method we’ve seen before. There’s enough information to build your own tiny LED driver with pulse width modulation, as well as tons of references to explain how and why he does things the way he does. Great job [doctek].

If you’re going to be doing a lot of soldering, you should check out our soldering station how to.