Wii Remote Controlled Balancing Wheel chair

April 25, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

The Personal Mobility Robot (PMR) has a chair for a passenger and balances on two wheels like a Segway. Now the clever folks at the University of Tokyo have added Wii remote control to the platform in a full-sized version of the Segwii. We understand that adding Wiimote control to anything isn’t exactly groundbreaking at this point. That being said, if using stock hardware can increase the quality of the user interface on something like a wheelchair, while decreasing the production cost at the same time, we’re all for it.

[Thanks Erico]

Flaming Hot Brick Plays Games, Promotes Tendonitis

April 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The continuing battle for smallest console-made-portable continues with this N64 portable hack. Unlike the last two that we saw, this version opts for an over-under rather than side-by-side control scheme. This results in a small overall size, but because this thing is a thick brick we wonder if playing for hours would just leave you horribly mangled and crippled from the elbow down. [Bentomo] may have thought the same thing because he also built a breakout connector to use the original controllers (and play with more than one player on that tiny screen). If you’re a slave to the build details like we are check out his build log and the video after the break.

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Force Feedback For The Nintendo DS

April 12, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBH6vQhKaiY]

This cool mod brings force feedback to the Nintendo DS. There’s a motor with an offset weight mounted inside the DS for vibration and some nice SMD LEDs plopped in there for good measure. The force feedback is being controlled via a picaxe mocrocontroller and triggered from the analog audio signal. While using the analog audio may not be the most precise method, he says that the results are pretty decent.

[Thanks Dan, via HacknMod]

SNES Controller + USB + Accelerometer

April 9, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 19 Comments

As we posted about [Atarity]’s XBMC hiding in an SNES controller, we were finishing work on a tutorial for [Adafruit]. The tutorial combines a Teensy USB development board with a 3D accelerometer inside of an SNES controller. The Teensy is programmed to poll the SNES controller buttons and read the accelerometer values. The buttons are set to keystrokes and mouse buttons, and the accelerometer values are processed into mouse movement. Programmed to play Portal, we created a video showing how to use the device. You can see it after the break.

It was not quite as easy or quick as the typical PC gamer left hand: WASD, right hand: mouse stance. However, we can think of a number of other games that could be improved with the use of a device that, with a bit of hacking, could time keystrokes as the user needed. With a bit more hacking, the device could be made to brute-force passwords. What else would you do with this?

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Flip-top GameCube Portable

March 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

Here’s another home console made into a portable. [Techknott] built this shiny GameCube handheld. You may remember him from his work on a portable Dreamcast and the wireless Xbox 360 interface. This time around he’s mirrored the finish; a good idea in concept but even his demo images are already plagued by smudges. But if you can keep your digits on the plastic buttons this makes for an eye-catching design. One part that we love is the flip-top screen that hides the optical drive. This is a much better solution than the exposed lens we saw on [Hailrazer’s] GC portable. As always, video after the break.

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Arduino To Nintendo DS Interface

February 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive data from the DS lite as shown in the example videos after the break. The data access is made possible by making the Arduino look like a controller that the DS is happy to talk to.

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Repair Or Improve Your NES

January 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

There’s a warm place in our hearts for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s too bad we don’t have that hardware sitting around anymore. But if you do there’s a chance it needs some TLC and there’s always room for a blue LED mod. [Raph] has a wonderful collection of NES hardware repairs and hacks that you should take a look at. These include replacing the power supply, fixing the cartridge connector, monkeying with the CIC chip, adding a reset button on the controller, converting the audio from mono to stereo, and yes, swapping in a blue LED. Oh, and as a side note, [Raph] gets a bit of extra hacker ‘cred for including “coded manually using VIM” at the bottom of his page. Classic.