[Ben Heck] the uber modder has posted a new project. He has made a breath controlled kick pedal for all of the Guitar Hero style games. Though the tutorial focuses on Guitar Hero World Tour, he does explain how it could be done for Rock Band at the end. This is intended for someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t actually use the kick pedal and needed their hands free to play the rest of the drums. He took apart the kick pedal that came with it to get the piezoelectric switch out of it. Then, he made a little chamber and placed the switch on a diaphragm at one end. When you blow, the diaphragm moves and triggers the switch. Pretty simple really. There is a video available of [Ben] trying it out as well.
Peripherals Hacks1450 Articles
Skate Or Die With A Real Skateboard
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPIwJO-Ekj4]
In order to update Skate or Die to a newer experience, [Jeff] has hacked together a skateboard controller for his Commodore 128. He’s using a parallax propeller to interface the skateboard to the unit, and another controller to boot up the game. Watch out Wii.
AVR Mega8 RSS Reader
[Barney_1] built this sereial RSS reader. He’s using the Dragon Rider 500 development board, which is a kit that has expansions available including the LCD, serial interface, and power supply. You don’t need the kit though, you could just build your own with similar specs. He has written a program in python to scrape RSS feeds and send them to the LCD. He’s got some specific workarounds for the Dragon Rider board if you do have one. You can download the firmware and source code on his site. You can see a video of it after the break.
LCD Repair
[Andrew] sent us this great breakdown of an LCD monitor repair. After his wife’s monitor developed an issue with rippling in the picture, he was forced to decide between trashing it, or fixing it. He decided for the latter, possibly to his wife’s disappointment. The rippling image could easily be attributed to a failed filter in the power supply. Knowing that capacitors are a prime suspect in these cases, he tore in, looking for failures. He found that there were, in fact, 2 bad capacitors on the back light circuit. After replacing them with newer, higher quality ones, the monitor was as good as new.
Mac Mini In An Old Apple II Disk Drive
Yo dawg, we heard you liked macs. [Charles] got sick of his Mac mini looking nice and pretty and decided to cram it into an old beige box. This old beige box just happened to be an old Apple II disk drive, so we guess that gives it some more street cred. The original disk drive sold in 1978 for $500. Man times have changed.
[thanks BluRy]
Rear Projection TV Multitouch
[Dave] sent us these fantastic instructions on how to hack a rear projection tv to be a multitouch interface. They’ve converted a 67″ inch TV by adding a couple of PS3 eye cameras and an infrared laser plane. There’s lots of great information, like how to replace the lenses on the PS3 eye cameras and how to create the custom fittings needed to make it all fit nicely. You can download the code, but it is Mac only. They claim that this is the first conversion of a commercial rear projection TV to multitouch, but we know better. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
Missile Launcher, IPhone Interface
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htd3s50Zhk8]
[Pedram] Sent us his USB missile launcher interface project. He happened to have some of the USB missile launchers lying around. having lost their initial draw, he wanted to do something to spice it up. He wrote an interface in python so he could control the launcher via his iPhone. We don’t see how this is any different than controlling them by the computer, but he seems to have put a decent amount of work into it.