Custom Starcraft Controller

July 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

This Starcraft controller was designed as a contest entry. The goal of the contest was to provide a custom controller for the Starcraft Real-Time-Strategy game that shared some of the features seen in First Person Shooter controllers.

The design started as rough sketches. From the there button layout was prototyped before actually building a virtual model of the entire controller. A rendering of the model was submitted as a contest entry, and we’re glad it was also seen through to a physical device. This involved sending the design files off for 3D printing. What came back was painted and assembled to achieve the beautiful look seen above.

On the right is a stick that acts as the mouse controller. The buttons on the left are just the most necessary of Starcraft control keys. They all map to the appropriate keyboard keys and the device enumerates as an HID keyboard so no button mapping is necessary. That being said, a player does have the option of remapping if the layout doesn’t suit.

[Via Reddit with more info at Shoryuken]

Turning An Arduino Into A USB Keyboard

June 29, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

The newly released Arduino Leonardo has a few very interesting features, most notably the ability to act as a USB keyboard and mouse thanks to the new ATmega 32U4 microcontroller. This feature isn’t exclusive to the Leonoardo, as [Michael] explains in a build he sent in – the lowly Arduino Uno can also serve as a USB HID keyboard with just a firmware update.

The Arduino Uno (and Mega) communicate to your computer through a separate ATmega8U2 microcontroller. Simply by uploading new firmware with the Arduino Device Firmware Upgrade, it’s easy to have your old Arduino board gain some of the features of newer boards such as the Teensy or Leonardo.

[Michael] goes through the steps required to make this upgrade work and ends his build by showing off an Arduinofied ‘cut, copy and paste’ button project as well as a few multimedia controls. You can check those builds out in the video after the break.

If emulating a USB keyboard isn’t your thing, it’s also possible to install LUFA firmware to emulate everything from joysticks to USB audio devices. Very cool, and very useful.

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Self-feeding Pen Printer

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

At first look we thought this was a plotter, but it’s really more of a dot matrix (or line matrix) printer. [Bruno] whipped this up using parts from a DVD optical drive. It is capable of moving the pen along the Z and X axes, and feeding the paper along the Y axis.

The video after the break shows the machine printing Megaman, an image perfectly suited to the low-resolution pixels this can put out. But even without the high-pixel counts you might get from a thermal printer, we just love the look of this one. And who doesn’t have an optical drive sitting around just waiting to be hacked? It looks like the one part you’re going to have to source is the stepper motor and geared feed wheel that moves the paper.

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Turning The Wii Classic Controller Into A Gaming Rig

June 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

A bit of clever design lets you mount a screen and gaming hardware right on this controller. [Valentin Ivanov] had already been using the Wii Classic Controller Pro as an input for his Gadgeteer-based projects. He wanted a way to marry the project board, display, and controller into one single unit.

We’re huge fans the design because it doesn’t require any alteration of the controller. Instead, five carefully designed pieces were cut from some thin plywood. They lock together into an assembly that embraces the top of the controller while providing plenty of mounting options for the prototyping hardware thanks to a large grid of holes. A couple of pieces of bronze rod lock the mounting bracket in place by keying into the screw holes in the bottom of the controller.

In the image above you can see Mini Pacman running on the rig. It’s now nearly portable, only relying on a barrel jack for power but we’re sure a battery pack could stand in if necessary.

Building A Clutch For Vim

June 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

Whether you’re using emacs, vi, or vim, your fingers will be performing acrobatics on your keyboard because of the mouseless interface. [alevchuk] thought his feet could be used as a way to reduce the amount of keystrokes, so he built the vim clutch. It’s a USB-enabled foot pedal that will insert characters before the cursor in vim.

Vim requires the user to type the letter ‘i’ to insert text before the cursor. [alevchuk] thought this function could be easily replicated by a foot pedal, so he found an extremely cheap USB foot pedal to serve as his vim clutch. Ideally, the pedal should send ‘i’ when it is pressed and Esc when it’s released. [alevchuk] took two pedals, programmed one to send ‘i’ and the other to send Esc, and put them in the same enclosure.

The result is a working clutch for inserting before the cursor in vim. [alevchuk] is looking into a three-pedal model to add inserting at the beginning and end of the line to his vim clutch, so we’ll keep an eye out for when he posts that build.

Recording Off A Reel-to-reel With A Credit Card Reader

June 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

If you’ve got a few reel-to-reel recordings of 1940s radio, how do you transfer those to a digital medium? [Evan Long] and his dad used a credit card reader built for the iPhone to transfer a vintage [Art Kassel] recording from magnetic tape to the digital domain of .MP3s.

A few months ago, we saw what goes into these Square credit card readers. They’re just a magnetic tape head with a resistor an 1/8″ jack that plugs directly into the headphone jack of any iDevice. Because there’s no hardware limitation of what the Square credit card reader can do, [The Long boys] decided to back up some old reel-to-reel tapes with an iPod Touch.

[Evan] and his father needed to perform a few modifications to the credit card reader; the tape head pressed against the plastic case too tightly to allow feeding 70-year-old tape through the device. After bending a bit of metal the credit card reader was ready to record the dulcet tones of the Big Band era.

It’s a neat build, and anything that reuses proprietary hardware (however limited) is alright in our book. Nice job, guys.

Volumetric Display Looks Like A DaVinci Sketch

June 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

This volumetric display really shows a lot of potential. And it has just the right balance of simplicity and ingenuity. The rig is being developed by [Michel David] and involves a screen shaped like a helix, and a laser which shines through an optical filter disk.

The moving parts of the device are mounted on the same shaft, which is spun by a belt system connected to a Dremel tool. Since the screen and the information disc are mounted on the same shaft, one part of the synchronization process is already taken care of. You can see the separate stand for the projector, which is a laser in this case but is designed to work with other light sources as well. Since the projection surface is moving towards and away from the projector, a laser is preferrable because of focus issues. Unfortunately [Michel] has been having some issues with switching the diode at high enough frequencies. Still, we think the results in the clip after the break are marvelous.

As far as hardware is concerned, this is a lot simpler than trying to spin a large LED matrix.

Continue reading “Volumetric Display Looks Like A DaVinci Sketch” →