Saturn Controller For The Xbox 360

saturn xbox controller

With a slate of old-school 2D fighting games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3 being released on the Xbox 360 [twistedsymphony] thought it would be nice to have a decent old-school gamepad to play them with. His final interface board lets you use an unmodified Saturn controller with the Xbox 360. He used a chopped up Saturn cable extender to attach the controller to a PIC16F690. The PIC decodes the Saturn pad’s button presses. It then triggers a corresponding analog switch that acts as a button press on the actual 360 controller. He did it this way instead of the much harder task of figuring out what the 360 controller protocol was actually doing. Future plans include support for other system’s controllers. Here’s a demo video.

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Staples Easy Button Hacking

easy button

Hack-A-Day reader [al cohen] was pretty perturbed by Staple’s Easy Button campaign since nothing in business is easy. So he decided to modify their cute button (PDF). He replaced the guts with a cheap recording circuit from RadioShack. He also added a 1/8 inch jack so you can record directly from the computer. The new button doesn’t need a separate mic either; you can record by speaking into the speaker. As a final touch Al ground off the easy, polished it and made the button evil. You can watch a video of the button declaring his distaste for Spam. You might have seen Jeff Caylor’s previous abuses of the Easy Button on Make. My roommate thought it would be funny if someone wired it to generate the “shift+delete” key sequence.

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Pong LED Hat

pong led hat

[lain]’s newest wearable project features two 21×10 dot displays (front and back). The panels are constructed from 5×7 LED modules from HP. The display is driven by an AVR ATMEGA32L. The 21×10 matrix would require 31 wires, but lain implemented a shift register so only 4 wires are needed. The hat has a microphone so it can do beat detection and VU display. It can also scroll space invaders, play pong and show text. The batteries and control board are in the ear flaps. Lain keeps referring to this as the perfect summer season hat which I can’t understand since today it’s going to hit 101degF at my house.

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USB WiFi External Antenna

usb wifi antenna

[ronobvious] purchased a Ralink based USB WiFi adapter for use with Aircrack-ng. It worked well so he decided to add an external antenna connector. The connector from Linx Technologies that he chose is really what makes this installation clean. It’s a card-edge design so you just slip it over the end and solder the pin and ground leg. He’s got a link to Tobias Hain’s similar mod and Tobias has a link to a another antenna project as well.

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Screwdriver RC Car

screwdriver RC car

[don] built this RC car using two $10 cordless screwdrivers and a few parts from his bin. He cracked open the screwdrivers and relocated the switches to the outside. These micro-switches are activated using some servos and radio gear he had laying around. For as little time as it took to build, the car seems pretty serviceable. He mounted a camera to a turning servo so he could see the car’s perspective. The camera looks into the turn so it’s easier to drive the car than if it was in a fixed position.

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Automated Master Lock Crackers

master lock cracker

[xander] sent in links to two machines designed to solve padlocks automatically. The first one just modified an old robot project since it already had the necessary stepper motor. The second one was built from scratch and includes a solenoid to test the lock. Both systems are just brute forcing the combination, but they do use some shortcuts. Even though locks have 60 numbers there is less than 20 actual divisions. Also, multiple final numbers can be tested without putting in the first two. With these two shortcuts there are approx. 400 passes. These machines can solve a lock in about 30 minutes. Of course we’ve shown before that any human can solve one in about 10 minutes.

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