Punchy Punchout Controller

February 3, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

punchy_mcpunchpunch

We love alternative inputs. They can revitalize an old classic or add a twist to most any mundane task. Here, we see a perfect example where the game Punch Out for the NES is being controlled by a punching bag type thing. The impact sensors were made by hand, and wired to a PC game pad. They were mounted on some foam, allowing for a nice mushy punching surface. There’s some feedback too, when your character is hit, a custom script detects the change in the sprites color and sends a signal to an Arduino. Right now, it just lights an LED, but the goal is to signal a strobe to make you flinch. This looks like it would be fun to play with, especially if you were to make it a little more high impact. You can see a video of them lightly assaulting it after the break.

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Monocular Head Mounted Display

February 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

glasses

[Xenonjon] wanted to make a Heads Up Display that he could use while maintaining the ability to see. The most logical choice was a monocular set up. He had an old Eye-Trek laying around and decided to sacrifice it to make his Heads Up Display. Combining a screen from his TV glasses and a wireless security camera setup, he was able to achieve an untethered monocular HUD. This has a multitude of uses, from displaying vital information, to home made night vision, or just watching TV while you work.

There’s plenty of good pictures and information there. The final result is a pair of safety glasses with the display and a pack that you have to put on your belt that holds batteries and the wireless receiver. It seems as though it isn’t horribly cumbersome, but we’d have to try it for a while to say if it would be ergonomically sound.

Wireless Genesis Controller For PC

February 1, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

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[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.

Surface Mount Soldering In Depth

January 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

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[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.

AVR Light Controller

January 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

halogen

[Matthias] sent us this project where he builds an AVR light controller. He had a halogen bike light laying around, but was unsatisfied with its lead-acid battery. He wanted to use a lithium-polymer battery but found that they can’t be used directly with halogen lamps due to their voltage. His produced 8.5 volts at full charge and can’t be discharged to below 5 volts. He new a power controller would be necessary to try to flatten that out for his lamp, which needed to stay between 6-12 volts.

He used an ATtiny45 doing PWM to change the voltage. Some other cool features he added were the high and low settings and an LED status light for warnings. You can find pictures, schematics and source code on his page as well as tons of great information. Great job [Matthias].

LED Push Buttons

January 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

[pros] has come up with a very elegant way of making lighted buttons (translated). Using a bunch of small push buttons harvested from old CD players, he rigged this unique way of mounting LEDs. Each LED has two buttons under it. They are wired in parallel, so if either of them is pushed, the button works. The LED isn’t actually soldered where it passes through the board. The anode and cathode are bent around and soldered to allow the LED a little bit of travel. There’s a good picture of how he did this on the site. The rest of the details might be hard to decipher though, it looks to be in dutch.

[thanks Tom]

5 Cent Tilt Sensor

January 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

5cent

This is a 5 cent tilt sensor. We know it cost more than 5 cents, but it is in fact a tilt sensor that utilizes a 5 cent coin. We’ve all done quick hacks to make quick sensors for various projects. We’ve seen tons of them, from stealing springs out of pens and shoving a resistor through them for flexible contact switches, to tin foil touch sensors. This one is new to us though. The design is fairly simple, you insert 4 bits of wire to serve as contacts and the coin will make contact with only two at a time. It isn’t analog, it isn’t extremely precise, but it is super quick and easy. Thanks for sharing [ix].