If you thought your Guitar Hero controller was only good for pretending to play music, think again. Yeah, lots of people have hacked the controller to achieve perfect scores, but what can you do that doesn’t require a console. Look after the break for some more creative ways of making music with a Guitar Hero controller.
Peripherals Hacks1561 Articles
How-To: Scavenge A Mouse For Parts
Chris Kiick posted about swarm robotics earlier in the week and today publishes his first Hack-A-Day How-To.
Old computer mice are being abandoned in droves. They’re tossed out because of dirt, obsolescence, or for being entirely too beige. Anyone who has a computer usually has more than one mouse and you can get them for pennies, if not free just for asking. Fortunately for the discriminating (read: cheap) hacker, these little widgets are chock-full of project parts. Today’s How-To will dissect a computer mouse, extract the useful parts, and give some ideas about how to use them.
Remote Control Whiteboard
Whenever [sprite_tm] sends in his latest project, it’s like getting a Christmas present and a night off. He put together a whiteboard, x/y stepper system, serial interfaced microcontroller and added a webcam with perspective correction for the online view. Me? I’m tempted to build one of these for leaving notes for the wife when I’m out.
Buy Ben’s PS3 Laptop
Just a little public service message: If you’ve been drooling over [Ben]’s work and have plenty of loose change, his PS3 laptop is up for auction to benefit the National Cancer Coalition.
Modchip Your XBox 360 Controller
[CyberPyrot] and [l0rdnic0] released their spitfire mod on acidmods for XBox 360 controllers. It involves some fine wiring, but a relatively low parts count. The heart of the mod is a PIC16F84A, a crystal for the clock and a few passive parts. It took me a little while to find it, but the code for the pic hiding under the parts list. For a lengthy demo of the mod in action, you can check out this video.
Related: Xbox 360 Hacks, Xbox Hacks
DIY PC Gaming Gun
[rustlabs] put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.
Grid Enabled USB Microscope
[Jock] sent in this photo gallery showing a Lego Mindstorm automated microscope. I dug up the paper that was published about this hack to find out just what the idea was. It’s a proof of concept showing off automated data collection – the Mindstorms are used to allow the intel QX3 microscope to take data over a grid area. It’s an interesting idea for collecting time series data. The computer interface is a bit overly complex, but the Lego’s make this sort of project accessible to the amateur roboticist.
