home entertainment hacks

770 Articles

Day O’ Guitar Hero Mods (with A Bonus)

December 3, 2007 by 20 Comments


I’ve already gotten a pile of tips on Guitar Hero controllers today, so here we go. The first one is already making the rounds. [Mark] replaced strummer with a touchscreen LCD and a magnetic switch. [Mark]s ultimate goal is to add some optical sensing and make the guitar self playing. For details, hit the acidmods thread or just watch the proof of concept demo.

[Johan] sent in the second controller of the day, and it’s probably my favorite for guitar bling. The original mushy switches were replaced with micro-switches and CNC milled replacement buttons. Each button is individually lit with LEDs and a cold cathode lights up translucent panel in the body. A PIC controller controls the lights and provides some input options for button tapping. The video is actually pretty entertaining to watch.

For a little bonus, check out [Mastershake916]’s cast Hack-A-Day pendant.

NES Inside A Controller With Cartridge Compatibility

November 29, 2007 by 10 Comments


[Tony] sent in this Nintendo hack. It’s a fully functioning NES with Composite output inside an old school controller. On the back it’s got a cartridge connector, so you can play normal games, there’s a port for a second player/light gun, and for extra bling, the Nintendo logo is backlit. To pull it off, he stuffed a Super Joy III – A.K.A. famiclone inside the controller, did a marathon of soldering for the cartridge connector, and used the now unused controller wires to carry the video and second controller signals.

Yes, this has been around for a while, but I dig it.

Rio Receiver SLIMP3 Emulator

November 23, 2007 by 10 Comments


[Roo] sent this in, and it took me a few minutes to see what’s so interested about a deprecated digital audio player. The Rio Receiver originally sold for about $350. Today it’s a dead product, but thanks to some software mods, it can be hacked to acquire the abilities of the SLIMP3(A.K.A. Squeezebox) player. So score one of these puppies on ebay and thanks to a combination of a modified kernel for the player and some software on a linux box, you you turn that old Rio Receiver into a SLIMP3 emulator.

Automatic Projector Calibration

November 15, 2007 by 40 Comments


[Johny Lee] sent in his(pdf) awesome projector calibration project. By adding embedding some optical fiber that feed into a set of USB connected light sensors, his groups software can determine the exact pixel position of each sensor. Once the positions are determined, the projected image can be dynamically adjusted to fix the screen. The technique can be used to stitch together multiple projectors, and even calibrate an image to project onto a three dimensional model. I know some home theater nuts that would love to have this system for calibrating their CRT projectors.

This is such an excellent project, that I want to give credit where it’s due – it was developed by [Johnny C. Lee], [Paul H. Dietz], [Dan Maynes-Aminzade], [Ramesh Raskar] and [Scott E. Hudson].

Be sure to check out the video demo after the break!

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Presenting Hackit – Got A Better Idea?

November 4, 2007 by 55 Comments


I came back from a quick road trip with a trunk full of hackable hardware. After grabbing a little caffeine this morning, I thought we’d try something different for those slow Sundays. I’m going to come up some interesting hacking kit, point out a few classic hacks for it, and challenge you guys to come up with something better. Every so often, we’ll be sending some of said hardware to the most worthy of commenters. Read on to check out our first ‘Hackit’ challenge.

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High Power TVBGone

October 25, 2007 by 20 Comments


[Ladyada]’s been busy lately. [bladdo] wrote in to tell me that she put together an extra powerful kit version of the TVBgone. This one’s supposed to be good for over 100 feet. If you really, really want to get your ass kicked during the super bowl, this baby in a sports bar should do the trick. There’s an optional programming header, so you could program it to turn every TV onto the SciFi channel.

Remember, I want to hear about your hacks! Use the tips line to send ’em in.

Speaker Power Detection Circuit

October 18, 2007 by 7 Comments


This is an interesting way to monitor your speakers. [Keith] put together this speaker line monitor after a commenter requested it on his blog. It’s designed to check for power on the speaker line and drive a logic/led output. Apparently there’s some risk of shorting your amp, so he’s planning to redesign the input stage. Still, it’s neat little hack to keep an eye on things. Personally, I’d just put em on their own class A amp and automate the power switching, but there are plenty of situations where this could be useful.