NES Game Pad Wireless Light Commander

February 21, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

NES_wireless_light_switch

Annoyed that the new lights he bought for his apartment lacked power switches, Instructables user [p.arry.drew] decided to install a pair of wireless light switches. Not content to use the remotes separately, he decided to see if he could cram them both into an old NES controller, making for a nice all-in-one wireless light commander.

He disassembled the light switch remotes, cutting off a bit of the battery contacts to ensure they fit in the game pad. He then pulled apart his NES controller, removing the cord and adding some foam padding to ensure that the buttons fully contacted the wireless switches when pressed. A few bits of wooden dowel were added to keep everything in place, then the controller was reassembled.

His creation makes for a very convenient method of controlling several light switches from once source, plus the packaging is pretty handsome as well. These remote light switching solutions seem to be all the rage lately, so keep them coming!

Read on for a quick video of his remote light switches in action.

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Bluetooth-enabled Wii Nunchuck

February 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

The wireless controller for the Nintendo Wii has been used in many a hack due to its simple to use Bluetooth interface. The nunchuck portion of the controller however, has always required a physical tether to the wireless controller, or an aftermarket wireless dongle. [Rousselmanu] is looking to change that with his Bluetooth-enabled wireless Wii nunchuck. He is able to retrieve a slew of data from the nunchuck, including information from all of the accelerometers, buttons, as well as the joystick. The data is read into a PIC MCU and relayed via serial to a Bluetooth module he purchased online.

The Bluetooth module looks fairly easy to interface in Linux, and [Rousselmanu] has a video showing off how well the nunchuck can be used to interact with 3D models. He admits that the controller is a bit ugly at the moment as all the components don’t quite fit so well, but future revisions will surely remedy that.

Keep reading to see a video of the nunchuck in action.

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NES Paul Game Controller

February 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

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[NeoTechni] wrote in to share the new game peripheral she built, dubbed the NES Paul. The ultimate goal of the project was to build a NES-styled controller for an upcoming game she is working on, tentatively titled 8-bit Hero. The guitar is constructed primarily from wood, as well as some scrounged bits she had around the house. An Xbox 360 controller was dismantled and wired to provide input for the guitar’s buttons and D-Pad. Even the Xbox controller’s rumble packs were used in order to provide visual feedback of missed notes via LED tuning pegs on the guitar’s headstock.

The writeup is broken into several pieces as it was put together in a handful of Google Buzz posts, but it is still relatively easy to follow. We can’t wait to see how the project comes together once the game portion has been completed.

Recordable SNES Belt Buckle

February 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

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[Andrew] recently offered to help out a friend who was looking to get her husband a SNES controller belt buckle. Rather than simply slap one together, he decided that it would be far cooler if the belt buckle played audio as well. He gutted a broken SNES controller, removing most everything inside, leaving just the buttons and a few wires.

To allow for the belt buckle to record sounds, he pulled apart a recordable balloon that would play a 10-second audio clip when shaken. He moved around a few wires, allowing for the audio board to be triggered by a button press rather than motion. Once that was done, he went about fitting it into the SNES controller, drilling speaker and microphone holes in the process. With the electronics components all set, he reassembled the controller shell and mounted it to an old belt buckle he had sitting around.

The final product looks extremely fun, and would make any die hard Nintendo fan’s day.

NintendOscope

February 14, 2011 by Kevin Dady 9 Comments

[Craig] has taken his gameboy hackery to the next step, using an oscilloscope as an external display. Back in November of 2010 [Craig] showed us how to extract the video data from a classic gameboy’s screen, armed with that information, and a pretty powerful XMega128A1 controller it seems straightforward to process that data and output it onto a oscilloscope that is in XY(z) mode, especially since he has done all of the hard work for us.

Scopes that feature XY mode typically have a Z input on the back, X controls where the beam is positioned from left to right, Y controls the beam from top to bottom, and Z controls the intensity of the beam. By sweeping the X and Y to act as lines, and Z to control the shade of the beam, its fairly easy to reuse your typically vector display as a raster display similar to televisions or computer monitors (as long as you have your math and timing right), making scopes very useful as output displays for devices like the gameboy, which do not have “standards” friendly display systems.

Join us after the break for a short video, and also check out the scope terminal, or the VGA-to Sope converter for more examples of how to use your oscilloscope as a raster display.

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NESBot Video Game Automation

February 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

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If you happen to enjoy video games, but don’t actually like playing them, boy do we have the hack for you! [pjgat09] shows us how, armed with an Arduino, you can force a Nintendo to play games by itself, not unlike an old-time player piano. The hack involves programming an Arduino to accept commands mapped out in “movies”, which are actually scripted sets of button presses that one would perform while playing a game. These sorts of scripts are available from TASVideo, a community specializing in “tool assisted” speed runs of video games. These movies are typically used with emulators, so there are some adjustments that need to be made in order to make them work with a console, since the button presses are mapped to each frame that is drawn on the screen. While we are not sure quite how useful this hack is, it is a pretty novel concept. You can see video of the 5-minute SMB speed run after the jump.

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Replace An N64’s Worn Out Joystick

February 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

As gaming consoles age the controllers will inevitably show some wear, and sadly may give out all together. [Kyle] couldn’t bear to watch his Nintendo 64 controller bite the dust so he replaced the thumb stick with one from a PlayStation. This is a bigger job than you might imagine because the two parts are fundamentally different. The original N64 stick uses a rotary encoder to output data to the control chip, while the PlayStation stick is an analog device. [Kyle’s] solution was to read the analog values using a PIC, but lower in the thread you can read about another user who pulled off a similar hack using an AVR. Both convert the signals into the rotary encoder format that the N64 chip is listening for. From the looks of the clip embedded after the break, this couldn’t work any better!

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