Handsome Sim Racing Button Box Is A Super Easy Build

August 14, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

Sim racing is a lot more complex than playing Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit. You need buttons for all kinds of stuff, from headlights to brake balance to traction control. If you want to control all that in an intuitive and realistic manner, you’ll want to build yourself a decent button pad like [Chris Haye] has done. It’s surprisingly easy, too!

[Chris] is quite a serious racer, and needed four button boxes. He wanted to do this on the cheap, so he decided to build his first three boxes around the Zero Delay Arcade USB Encoder, a cheap controller board available on eBay for around £7. Arcade buttons were sourced off Amazon to populate the black project boxes which acted as the housings.

His final button pad looks straight out of a GT3 race car, but it’s the simplest of the bunch. It’s literally just a USB numpad with a carbon vinyl wrap applied and some home-printed labels. One suspects the feel isn’t particularly high-quality but the look is top tier. If you’re a streamer that wants to build a hardcore-looking setup, this is a great way to go.

[Chris] estimates that each box took maybe an hour to build, tops. It’s a great example of solution-focused design. He could have gotten out his own microcontroller and done a custom PCB and all that, and the results surely would have been good. But it would have taken far longer! It’s hard to beat the speed of wiring together Amazon arcade buttons with the Arcade USB Encoder’s pre-terminated wire harness. If you’re more interested in sim racing than building button boxes, it’s a great way to do a custom pad fast.

Best of all? [Chris] says he managed to put these all together for £60—quite a feat of bargain engineering. We’ve featured some other builds along these lines before, too—even using vintage aircraft controls! Video after the break.

Continue reading “Handsome Sim Racing Button Box Is A Super Easy Build” →

Cheap DIY Button Pad Uses Neat Punchcard Trick

August 13, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

A StreamDeck is effectively a really cool box full of colorful buttons that activate various things on your PC. They’re fun and cool but they’re also something you can build yourself if you’re so inclined. [Jason] did just that for his sim racing setup, and he included some nifty old-school tech as well.

An ESP32 is at the core of the build, listening to button presses and communicating with the PC. However, the build doesn’t actually use regular buttons. Instead, it uses infrared sensors wired up in a matrix. This was an intentional choice, because [Jason] wanted the device to be reconfigurable with different paper card overlays. There are ways to do this with regular buttons too, but it works particularly well with the infrared technique. Plus, each button also gets a Neopixel allowing its color to be changed to suit different button maps.

What’s really neat is that the button maps change instantly when a different overlay card is inserted. [Jason] achieved this with an extra row of infrared sensors to detect punched holes in the bottom of the overlay cards.

Once upon a time, even building your own keyboard was an uphill battle. Today, it’s easier than ever to whip up fun and unique interface devices that suit your own exact needs. That’s a good thing! Video after the break.

Continue reading “Cheap DIY Button Pad Uses Neat Punchcard Trick” →

A single-key macro pad with a screen built into the button.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Are You A Good Judge Of Time?

August 11, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

What can you do with a one-button keyboard? Quite a bit, actually, especially if that key has a little screen on it. That’s the idea behind [Maker M0]’s MagicClick macro pad, which is an updated version of a highly useful project we have featured in the past. Well, now there’s a tiny game to go with it.

Think you’re pretty good at measuring the passage of time? This game will likely prove you wrong. Press and hold the button and the timer begins with some pre-determined interval, such as four seconds. Once you think those four seconds have passed, release the button and find out how far off you were.

While the first version of this keyboard used the CH582F RISC-V microcontroller, the second and this third version use an ESP32-S3 on a custom, tightly packed PCB. That TFT display measures 0.85″, and the battery is an 3.7 V 802025 Li-Po. [Maker M0] has also redesigned this to make it easier to print, and plans to support circular screens in the near future.

Video Game Preservation – Stop Killing Games!

August 10, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 60 Comments

It’s been an ongoing issue for years now. People who buy video games, especially physical copies, expect to be able to play that game at their leisure, no matter how old their console gets. This used to be a no-brainer: think about the SNES or Genesis/Mega Drive from the late 80s and early 90s. You can still buy one today and play the games without any issues. Not so with many modern, internet-connected games that rely on communication with servers the publishers own, whether or not the online features are necessary for gameplay. Stop Killing Games is a new initiative in the EU and worldwide to get enough valid petition signatures to force the issue to be brought up in parliaments all over the world, including the EU Parliament.

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.

StopKillingGames.com

Why now? Well, Ubisoft recently killed a popular videogame called The Crew by taking down the servers that support the game. Without these servers, the game is completely useless. France and many other European countries have strong consumer protection laws which, in theory, should prevent companies from pulling stunts like this, but this particular situation has never been tested in court. Besides this, the group are also petitioning governments around the world, including France (where Ubisoft is based), Germany, Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, and Brazil, and also options for anywhere else in the EU/world.

If you’re a gamer, and especially if you play video games which use online components, it’s definitely worth reading through their website. The FAQ section in particular answers a lot of questions. In any case, we wish them luck as the preservation of media is a very important topic!

[Thanks to Jori for the tip!]

Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!

August 8, 2024 by Al Williams 1 Comment

From the “why didn’t we think of that” department comes [dupontgu’s] pong mouse project. The mouse appears and acts like a normal computer mouse until you click the scroll wheel. When you do, the mouse rapidly moves the cursor on the connected computer to play pong. Obviously, though, the paddles and the ball all look like your cursor, whatever that happens to be. So, how do you tell the score? Well, when a score happens, the cursor shows between the two paddles. In the middle means the game is tied. Otherwise, the player closest to the score indicator is winning. Continue reading “Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!” →

A Smart LED Dice Box Thanks To The Internet Of Things

August 8, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

If there’s one thing humans love, it’s dancing with chance. To that end, [Jonathan] whipped up a fun dice box, connecting it to the Internet of Things for additional functionality.

Expect dice roll stat tracking to become a big thing in the D&D community.

The build is based around Pixels Dice. They’re a smart type of IoT dice that contains Bluetooth connectivity and internal LEDs. The dice are literally capable of detecting their own rolls and reporting them wirelessly. Thus, the dice connects to the dice box, and the dice box can literally log the rolls and even graph them over time.

The project was built in a nice octagonal box [Jonathan] picked up from a thrift store. It was fitted with a hidden battery and ESP32 to communicate with the dice and run the show. The box also contains integrated wireless chargers to recharge the dice as needed, and a screen for displaying status information.

The dice and dice box can do all kinds of neat things, like responding with mood lighting and animations to your rolls—for better or worse. There are some fun modes you can play with—you can even set the lights to sparkle if you pass a given skill check in your tabletop RPG of choice!

If you play a lot of tabletop games, and you love dice and statistics, this is a project well worth looking into. Imagine logging every roll so you can see how hot you are on a given night. Or, heck—whether it was the dice’s fault you lost your favorite player character in that foreboding dungeon.

We see a few dice hacks now and then, but not nearly enough. This project has us questioning where smart dice have been all our life! Video after the break.
Continue reading “A Smart LED Dice Box Thanks To The Internet Of Things” →

Asteroids: Kessler Syndrome Edition

August 5, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

Asteroids, the late-70s arcade hit, was an immensely popular game. Often those with the simplest premise, while maintaining a fun, lighthearted gameplay have the most cultural impact and longest legacy. But, although it was popular, it doesn’t really meet the high bar of scientific fidelity that some gamers are looking for. That’s why [Attoparsec] built the Kessler Syndrome Edition of this classic arcade game.

The Kessler Syndrome is a condition where so much man-made debris piles up in low-Earth orbit that nothing can occupy this orbit without getting damaged or destroyed by the debris, and thus turning into more debris itself in a terrible positive feedback loop. [Attoparsec] brings this idea to Asteroids by reprogramming the game so that asteroids can be shot into smaller and smaller pieces but which never disappear, quickly turning the game into a runaway Kessler Syndrome where the chance of survival is extremely limited, and even a destroyed player’s ship turns into space junk as well.

To further the scientific accuracy and improve playability, though, he’s added a repulsor beam mechanism which can push the debris a bit and prolong the player’s life, and also added mass effect reactions so that even shooting bullets repels the player’s ship a bit. The build doesn’t stop with software, either. He also built a custom 70s-style arcade cabinet from the ground to host the game.

Asteroids is still a popular platform for unique builds like this. Take a look at a light-vector game using lasers to create the graphics, or this tiny version of the game that uses a real CRT.

Thanks to [smellsofbikes] for the tip!

Continue reading “Asteroids: Kessler Syndrome Edition” →