Here’s an interesting setup using a GameBoy Advance as an interface and power supply for a PIC microprocessor. He’s got the PIC connected to the serial port of the GameBoy Advance and is able to pass and retrieve data for display on the screen. You can see above that he is showing two analog values from the pic. You can download the schematic and source code and see a few more pictures, but that’s about it.
[via HackedGadgets]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j2kw5MJK24]
The folks at Waterloo Labs have delivered a quite amusing project where they built a system to control Mario with eye movements. Unlike the other eye movement systems we’ve seen that use imaging to detect where you are looking, this one is using electrodes on muscles in your face. Not only do they supply a fairly amusing video, they also have a pretty good amount of detail on the project site. Be sure to click on the links in the “additional resources” section at the bottom if you want hardware and software details on the build. The last time we saw these folks, they were using real guns to control video games.
[via Procrastineering]
If you’ve got an iPhone or Android device that you use with a Wii remote when gaming, this quick hack will give you the third hand you need to manage all of that hardware. [Syanni85] mounted his Android phone to a Wii wheel for just a few dollars in parts. He ran across the wheel itself at the dollar store, and the phone is held in place using a universal mounting bracket. A small square pad sticks onto the back of any device and mates with a base. He cut off the unnecessary parts of the base and glued it to the back of the wheel.
If you haven’t tried using a Wii remote with your phone yet, find out how to do it with iPhone or with Android.
[Mr.X] added support for four controllers to his Super Nintendo (Google translated) by internalizing the multi-player adapter. In the video after the break you’ll notice that he also added some bling to the case by positioning the power LED beneath the logo and adding a two-digit display. There is a switch on the back that allows him to choose PAL or NTSC standards with the current setting shown on that display. While most people are going with emulators, [Mr.X] ended up with a custom piece of hardware with a clean finish.
Regular Hackaday reader [Osgeld] is at it again with this USB conversion for an NES controller. This is a ubiquitous hack that we started seeing very early on, sometimes involving an adapter kit, and other times including things like a thumb drive and USB hub. But this time around is truly a bare-bones version. He’s using an Arduino but it’s really just an AVR ATmega168 running the bootloader. We’d wager this can be done with an ATmega8 just as easily. Grab a couple of diodes (we never seem to have the 3.6v zener diodes around when we need them), a couple caps and resistors, a crystal and you’re in business. The hack wires each button to a pin and implements a keyboard HID that can be mapped for any purpose you desire.
These aren’t terrorists, they’re electrical engineering students. For their final project they developed a headband and rifle input system for the NES. The controllers send data to a laptop which then maps out the inputs to NES controller commands and sends them to an original NES console, no emulation here.
The controllers in the headband and rifle are Firefly sensor network nodes. Originally, [Kevin] and [Evan] tried using accelerometers for motion information but found the data do be unreliable. After an upgrade to gyroscope modules the interface is much more responsive, as seen about 3:50 into the video after the break. We like seeing motion controller hacks and we appreciate the choice of a classic system (and lesser known game title). This really makes it a whole different game.
