Accelerometer Controlled Pong

September 23, 2008 by Ian 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYVgXYtxk4E]

[Perry’s] awesome AcceLED Pong project gives new life to a classic game by adding acceleration-based control. The pong paddles are moved by tilting the circuit left or right. Motion is measured by an ADXL203 dual axis accelerometer, and an ATMEGA32 microcontroller converts acceleration into ball and paddle movement. The game display is a three-color SparkFun 8×8 LED matrix with serial interface.

[Perry] also used a similar setup to make a USB LED spectrum analyzer fed by the Linux XMMS media player.

Fatality And A Frosty Mug: Arcade Bar

September 23, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

We’ve seen our fair share of home made arcade machines, some complex and some simple. This one stands head and shoulders above the rest with its ability to combine two of our deepest loves: beer and video games. There’s not a lot of information, just a few pictures. We’d love to see some build shots or action shots. We’d love to test it out actually.

Here’s an update: [Burke LaShell] is the maker of this fine project. You can see more pictures of it in this thread. Thanks, [Shawn].

[via Gizmodo]

Turn Your Projector Into A Laser Guided Controller

September 22, 2008 by Joey Celis 16 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJgzwW2C6DQ&fmt=18]

[Alpay Kasal] of LitStudios as come up with an interesting way to use laser pointers as a wireless controller for games and applications. The process is currently being patented, which may explain why [Alpay]’s blog is a little slim in the details. We doubt they’re doing anything more than just using a camera to track the laser pointer; exactly like laser tagging.

If you’re just itching to get your hands on some wireless game play and can’t wait for this to go commercial you could always just get a Nintendo Wii.

[via Engadget]

Broken LCD TV Turned Into A Light Table

September 22, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

[Steve DiRaddo] sent us this sweet little mod. After obtaining a free LCD TV that had a cracked screen, [steve] immediately tore it open to re purpose it. The end result was a computer controlled light table with audio. From what he says, it is very very bright due to the fact that it has 16 CFL tubes behind it as opposed to the usual 2 inside a PC monitor. The TV had a bult in RS232 command port. Whith some quick hacking, he was able to control power, channel, input, and volume via his laptop.

Xbox 360 Laptop In Progress

September 21, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

[Ben Heck] posted and update on a project he’s doing for THQ. This latest Xbox 360 laptop is being built as a contest prize. It’s based on a 60GB Xbox 360 and is slightly larger than the previous laptops. It can accommodate a standard 360 hard drive without modification. An Xbox Live camera is included as well.

We hadn’t realized how many Xbox 360 laptops [Ben] had built. There’s the original. The one he built as a how-to for Engadget. Then, the one based on an Elite and now this.

XBMC Cross Platform Beta Released

September 20, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

It’s been a big week for the XBMC team. They announced the release of their first cross platform beta in preparation for a full release in October. XBMC started as a media center project for the original Xbox, but has expanded a lot since then. The new beta works on Linux, OSX (Leopard and Tiger), Windows, and Xbox. They’ve created XBMC Live, so you can get XBMC up and running quickly either by booting from the CD, from a flash drive, or using it to install to a disk. People have been writing add on apps too, like the XBMC Remote for iPhones.

This summer we covered both Boxee, a social version of XBMC, and Plex, the original XBMC OSX fork.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator Teardown

September 18, 2008 by Ian 16 Comments

m8ta fun did an extensive teardown of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA). OCZ’s computer/mind interface is actually a fairly straight forward design. An analog front-end cleans and amplifies the ‘neural’ signal with a few op-amps before feeding it to a 24 bit analog to digital converter (ADC). A USB enabled PIC microcontroller reads the 24bit parallel ADC output through a common 7400 series parallel to serial adapter IC. The device has an ICSP programing header (top right), though it’s not yet clear if the PIC can be read or written.

[Thanks, joeyo]