“Superfan” Gaming Peripheral Lets You Feel Your Speed

January 7, 2015 by Matt Freund 15 Comments

Virtual reality has come a long way but some senses are still neglected. Until Smell-O-Vision happens, the next step might be feeling the wind in your hair. Perhaps dad racing a sportbike or kids giggling on a rollercoaster. Not as hard to build as you might think, you probably have the parts already.

Off-the-shelf devices serve up the seeing and hearing part of your imaginary environment, but they stop there. [Jared] wanted to take the immersion farther by being able to feel the speed, which meant building his own high power wind generator and tying it into the VR system. The failed crowdfunding effort of the “Petal” meant that something new would have to be constructed. Obviously, to move air without actually going on a rollercoaster requires a motor controller and some fans. Powerful fans.

A proponent of going big or going home, [Jared] picked up a pair of fans and modified them so heavily that they will launch themselves off of the table if not anchored down. Who overdrives fans so hard they need custom heatsinks for the motors? He does. He admits he went overboard and sensibly way overbudget for most people but he built it for himself and does not care.

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Sega Controller Hack Updated For Windows Auto-Launch

January 3, 2015 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Who knew that modern versions of Windows have nixed the option to auto-launch when a USB drive is inserted? Not a big deal unless, like [sonicdude10], you want to base a hack on the behavior. He did find a workaround and recently built a Sega Controller emulator to autoplay on Windows computers.

The bulk of the hack was inspired by a Sega Emulator built in a controller which he saw on Hackaday a couple of years back. It’s simply a Sega-like USB gamepad which has a hub and thumb drive internalized. The hardware changes on [sonicdude10’s] version gets rid of the old thumb drive and replaces it with one that supports U3. This is a hardware emulation trick supported by some USB drives which allows them to enumerate as CD drives instead of USB mass storage. Autoplay for CD drives is still functional in Windows.

We’ve heard a bit about U3 over the years. There was a now-dead hack covered all the way back in 2006. And we even found a comment suggesting its use for USB-based game emulators. [sonicdude10] points to two useful tools that let him customize how U3 performs. u3_tool is a multitool for tweaking how the hardware behaves, u3-autorun makes customization of the auto-launching app a snap.

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Electronic Glove Detects Sign Language

December 20, 2014 by Rick Osgood 11 Comments

A team of Cornell students recently built a prototype electronic glove that can detect sign language and speak the characters out loud. The glove is designed to work with a variety of hand sizes, but currently only fits on the right hand.

The glove uses several different sensors to detect hand motion and position. Perhaps the most obvious are the flex sensors that cover each finger. These sensors can detect how each finger is bent by changing the resistance according to the degree of the bend. The glove also contains an MPU-6050 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. This sensor can detect the hand’s orientation as well as rotational movement.

While the more high-tech sensors are used to detect most characters, there are a few letters that are similar enough to trick the system. Specifically, they had trouble with the letters R, U, and V. To get around this, the students strategically placed copper tape in several locations on the fingers. When two pieces of tape come together, it closes a circuit and acts as a momentary switch.

The sensor data is collected by an ATmega1284p microcontroller and is then compiled into a packet. This packet gets sent to a PC which then does the heavy processing. The system uses a machine learning algorithm. The user can train the it by gesturing for each letter of the alphabet multiple times. The system will collect all of this data and store it into a data set that can then be used for detection.

This is a great project to take on. If you need more inspiration there’s a lot to be found, including another Cornell project that speaks the letters you sign, as well as this one which straps all needed parts to your forearm.
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Right Hand Loses Job As Head-Mouse Enters Mousing Arena

December 20, 2014 by Rich Bremer 34 Comments

Moving the cursor around your computer screen is an everyday occurrence that we humans do not give much of a second thought to. But what if you didn’t have to move your hands from the keyboard anymore? Sure there are keyboards with Track Point or even track pads not to far from the keys, which isn’t too bad. What if you could just slightly point your face in the desired direction the mouse would move? The [Sci-Spot] folks wondered that same question and came up with a DIY Head Mouse.

The concept is pretty darn simple; a web cam is mounted to the user’s head and points at the computer screen. Mounted on top of the screen is one IR LED. Our eyes can not see the IR light so it is not annoying or distracting. The camera, however, is filtered to only see IR by placing a couple of layers of camera film negative over the lens. Before you go complaining about strapping a camera to your noggin just think of building it into a hat, which we’ve seen used for adaptive technologies like this PS3 controller.

Custom software was written to move the mouse cursor; see the black window in the above dialog box? That represents the webcam’s field of view and the white spot is the IR LED. When the user’s head moves, the IR LED moves in relation to the camera’s field of view, in turn telling the computer to move the cursor a certain amount. There are a couple of options available like ‘magnification’ which changes how much the cursor moves with a given amount of head movement and ‘deadzone’ that ignores extremely small movements that can result from breathing.

There is no mention of how button clicks are recorded but we think a couple of buttons right below the space bar would be great. The control software is available for download on the Sci-Spot page for those who want to make their own.

Vintage Apple Keyboard Revived As Standalone Computer

December 10, 2014 by Matt Freund 23 Comments

Many of our readers are familiar with the gold standard of classic PC keyboards – the bunker with switches known as the IBM Model M. The Model M’s Apple contemporary is the Apple Extended Keyboard and they are just as highly sought-after by their respective enthusiasts. Though discontinued almost 25 years ago and incompatible with anything made in the last 15, the codenamed “Saratoga” is widely considered the best keyboard Apple ever made.

[Ezra] has made a hobby of modernizing these vintage heartthrobs and rescuing them from their premature obsolescence. In a superbly documented tutorial he not only shows how to convert them to USB (a popular and trivial hack), but teaches you how and where to smuggle a Raspberry Pi in as well.

After disassembly, the project requires only a little bit of chisel and Dremel work before the soldering iron comes out. [Ezra] was fairly meticulous in removing or redirecting the Pi’s connectors and hardwiring the internals. Only 3 pins need to be traced from the original keyboard and [Ezra]’s ADB–>USB Rosetta Stone of choice is the Hasu Converter running on a Atmega 32u4 clone. Balancing cost, range, and power draw from the Pi, he settled on the TP-LINK WN722N for his WiFi solution which is also tucked away inside the case. A single pullup resistor to finish it off and [Ezra] was delighted to discover it worked the first time he plugged it in.

Keyboards from this era use actual momentary switches that audibly click twice per keypress. In our world of screens-as-keys celebrating the lack of tactile constraints, using beasts like the Model M or the AEK to force transistors to do your bidding is like racking a shotgun during a game of lasertag – comically obtuse but delightfully mechanical.

If you are looking to expand on [Ezra]’s tinkering, he has already made a wishlist of additions: a toggle switch to lobotomize the Pi back into a plain USB keyboard, an internal USB hub, and a power switch.

Hear the video of an AEK in action after the break (or loop it to sound productive while you nap).

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Discovering The Protocol In A USB VoIP Phone

November 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

[Daniel] picked up a cheap USB handset to use with his VoIP provider, and included in the box was a CD with all the software that would make this handset work with Windows. [Daniel] is running Linux on his main battlestation, rendering the included CD worthless. Using the handset under Linux would be a problem; although the speaker and mic worked, the buttons and screen did not. No problem, then: [Daniel] just played around with the command line until he figured it out.

The handset presented itself to the Linux box as a soundcard and HID device. The soundcard was obviously the speaker and mic, leaving the buttons and display as the HID device. [Daniel] checked this out by running a hexdump on the HID device and pressed a few buttons. His suspicions were confirmed, and he could easily read the button with a little bit of Python.

With the speaker, mic, and buttons on the handset figured out, [Daniel] turned his attention to the one bit of electronics on the phone he hadn’t yet conquered: the display. After firing some random data at the phone, the display blinked and showed a messy block of pixels, confirming the display was controlled through the HID driver. Loading up usbsnoop to see what the original software does to update the screed showed [Daniel] the data format the display accepts, allowing him to control everything in this VoIP phone.

PCB Toner Transfer Method, Now Without The Transfer

October 12, 2014 by Rich Bremer 47 Comments

A common way to create a custom PCB at home is to do what is called the Toner Transfer Method. In this process, the trace layout of the board is printed out on a piece of special toner transfer paper that allows the ink to come off in the following step. The toner transfer paper is then put print-side-down on a copper clad PCB blank, heated and pressed with an iron. The heat and pressure from the iron transfers the toner from the paper to the copper. The exposed copper then is chemically removed, the previously applied toner protects the copper in the pad and trace areas. The toner is then removed using paint thinner.

That is a long process with many critical steps. [mlerman] wondered why no one was printing the toner directly to the PCB. He has been tinkering with printing directly on PCB blanks for 4 years now. He’s made hundreds of boards over that time and can now make a PCB in under 15 minutes.

The obvious route to take would be to modify a current laser printer to accept the much-thicker-than-paper PCB boards. A few printer models were tried but [mlerman] feels the Lexmark E260 works the best due to the cost, internal mechanical components and an easily modifiable manual feed system. There is also a Local Printer Utility that allows the majority of the printer parameters to be adjusted.

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