You can pick up a Wii Motion Plus module for under $20 and that’s not bad for an I2C gyroscope. This hack taps into the device through a PC parallel port. The connection calls for some level conversion to step down to the 3.3v needed by the module. The communication protocol borrows from the Wii on Arduino code examples that we saw last year. You can see the Wii Motion Plus controlling a virtual cube in the video after the break.
If you are looking to do some face tracking and don’t know where to start, this explanation of how to do it with X10 modules could be pretty helpful. Aside from having, what some could consider to be, the absolute most annoying website ever for a company, X10 also makes modular systems for home automation. X10 also refers to the industry standard for home automation, so sometimes just saying you did something with X10 can get confusing. He is using the SDK to write custom code for the tracking, which you can download from the project page.
[via HackedGadgets]
[Stefan] sent in this project writeup to show us how he used a stepper motor as a rotary encoder. Using a stepper motor as an encoder isn’t really that new, as [Stefan] points out, we’ve seen it several times before. He wanted to use this in the quickest simplest way with his computer though. Instead of doing any decoding on a separate microprocessor, he’s connected the stepper directly to his sound card and written code to do the rest. You can download that code and see a video of some practical applications on his site.
Before we get started, lets just point out that this C64 was broken. He did not take a functional C64 out of operation for this. What he did do, was to build a hardware interface for for his VICE system. For those unfamiliar, VICE is a cross platform C64 emulator. [Simon] points out that the old games just weren’t as much fun without the original hardware. Having a broken C64 lying around, he put it to good use. It now acts as the interface for all the original fun stuff.
If you are a fan of the hardware, but just want to interface it as a normal USB keyboard, that is possible as well.
ProjectExciteBike is on its second iteration of an exercise bike controller for Xbox 360. The controller takes pedal input from the cranks of the exercise bike. The sensing is handled by a ring of five hall effect sensors that detect a passing magnet attached to the crank. The sensor data is collected and processed by an Arduino which connects to a wireless Xbox 360 controller for output.
This version of the gaming device includes a fine adjustment widget. It uses a row of LEDs to represent the speed of the pedals and has a slider to adjust how much of an effect this has on the game. This is what we envisioned for the trainer computer we saw yesterday. Take a look at some game play video after the break and dig through the code if you have an exercise bike waiting to be recommissioned.
This instrument caught our eye. It is a Laser device that looked like it could do midi input of some type. We played a little bit, but really weren’t too impressed. You know why? We’ve seen better.
[James] – Way to be hackers.
[Oliver] received the Telly Terminator as a gift and decided to take a closer look at it. This key fob has two buttons; one shines an LED like a flashlight and the other turns off televisions. Sound familiar? Yeah, it made [Oliver] think of the TV-B-Gone as well.
He cracked open the case to find just a few components. The brain behind the IR signals is a Helios H5A02HP. Only a few pins are used for outputs so he connected a logic analyzer and recorded the signals. His writeup covers the process quite well. He takes a known IR transmitter protocol and compares it to the capture from the logic analyzer. It turns out that the fob generates 46 different signals and with further analysis concludes that there’s a chance the code used here is from an older version of the TV-B-Gone source.
