Exploring The Hall Effect For Haptic Feedback PS4 Joysticks

January 26, 2023 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

Modern gaming console controllers aren’t without their annoyances — Joy-Con drift, anyone? The problems might stem from design deficiencies, but we suspect that user enthusiasm and the mechanical stress it can introduce might play a significant role as well. Either way, [Marius Heier] decided to take a look at what would be required to build a better joystick and came up with some interesting results.

The first video below lays the basic groundwork, with a bunch of experiments with 3-axis Hall effect sensors, specifically the Texas Instruments TMAG5273 and TMAG5170. They’re essentially the same sensor with different interfaces — SPI for the 5170 and I2C for the 5273. Using just one of these sensors, he was able to build a joystick with the usual X- and Y- axis control, but also with a rotary axis. What’s more, he built a motorized version using two NEMA 17 steppers to mechanically drive the stick back to center.

The joystick is bulky, but it looks like he’s got plans for a much smaller one with [Carl Bugeja]-style PCB motors that should fit into a PS4 controller. That’s the subject of the second video below, which uses a different Hall sensor — an Allegro A1304 — and is mainly concerned with getting the output of a non-motorized but considerably miniaturized joystick stick talking the language that the controller expects. It’s not a simple process, but it seems to be coming along nicely, and we’ll be watching progress closely.

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DIY Macro Keyboard Wood Be Nice

January 25, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Editing video tends to involve a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and while this might be fine for the occasional edit, those who regularly deal with video often reach for a macro pad to streamline their workflow. There are plenty of macro keyboards available specifically meant to meet the needs of those who edit a lot of video, but if you want something tailored for your personal workflow you may want to design your own keyboard like this wooden macro pad from [SS4H].

The keyboard itself is built around an STM32 microcontroller, which gives it plenty of power to drive and read the keyboard matrix. It also handles an encoder that is typically included on macro keyboards for video editing, but rather than using a potentiometer-type encoder this one uses a magnetic rotary encoder for accuracy and reliability. There’s a display built into the keyboard as well with its own on-board microcontroller that needs to be programmed separately, but with everything assembled it looks like a professional offering.

[SS4H] built a prototype using 3D printed parts, but for the final version he created one with a wooden case and laser etched keys to add a bit of uniqueness to the build. He also open-sourced all of the PCB schematics and other files needed to recreate this build so anyone can make it if they’d like. It’s not the only macro keyboard we’ve seen before, either, so if you’re looking for something even more esoteric take a look at this keyboard designed to be operated by foot.

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What Else Is An M.2 WiFi Slot Good For?

January 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Many mainboards and laptops these days come with a range of M.2 slots, with only a subset capable of NVME SSDs, and often a stubby one keyed for ‘WiFi’ cards. Or that’s what those are generally intended to be used for, but as [Peter Brockie] found out when pilfering sites like AliExpress, is that you can get a lot of alternate expansion cards for those slots that have nothing to do with WiFi.

Why this should be no surprise to anyone who knows about the M.2 interface is because each ‘key’ type specifies one or more electrical interfaces that are available on that particular M.2 slot. For slots intended to be used with NVME SSDs, you see M-keying, that makes 4 lanes of PCIe available. The so-called ‘WiFi slots’ on many mainboards are keyed usually for A/E, which means two lanes of PCIe, USB 2.0, I2C and a few other, rather low-level interfaces. What this means is that you can hook up any PCIe or or USB (2.0) peripheral to these slots, as long as the bandwidth is sufficient.

What [Peter] found includes adapter cards that add Ethernet (1 Gb, 2.5 Gb), USB 2.0 ports, SIM card (wireless adapter?), an SFP fiber-based networking adapter, multiple M.2 to 2+ SATA port adapters, tensor accelerator chips (NPUs) and even a full-blown M.2 to x16 PCIe slot adapter. The nice thing about this is that if you do not care about using WiFi with a system, but you do have one of those ports lounging about uselessly, you could put it to work for Ethernet, SFP, SATA or other purposes, or just for hooking up internal USB devices.

Clearly this isn’t a market that has gone unexploited for very long, with a bright outlook for one’s self-designed M.2 cards. Who doesn’t want an FPGA device snuggled in a PCIe x2 slot to tinker with?

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Spray-On Keyboard Is As Light As It Gets

January 18, 2023 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

We’ve all seen those ‘nothing’ keyboards, where the keys themselves are not much more than projected lasers, and users are asked to ritually beat their poor fingertips into the table — which has little give and even less clack. Well, a team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have come up with a way to eschew the keyboard altogether.

Essentially, the user wears a thin, breathable mesh of silver nanowires coated in gold, which is then embedded in a polyurethane coating. The mesh is sprayed onto their forearms and hands on the spot, and the mesh terminates in a small enclosure that is also worn on the skin. This contains a small Bluetooth unit that beams data back to a computer, a machine, or potentially another user wearing the same type of unit.

As the skin stretches and contorts, the mesh senses small electrical changes within. These changes become meaningful with applied AI, which maps the changes to specific gestures and manual tasks. To do this, the team started with teaching it to distinguish between patterns from tasks like typing on a phone, typing on a regular keyboard, and then holding and interacting with six differently-shaped simple objects.

The team isn’t stopping there — they plan to try capturing a larger range of motion by using the nanomesh on multiple fingers. In addition to facilitating communication between humans and machines, this could leave a huge fingerprint on gaming and VR.

Stadia Says Goodbye With Bluetooth And Crap Game

January 15, 2023 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

In just a few days time, Google’s Stadia game streaming service will finally shut down for good. But not for any technical reason, mind you. Microsoft has managed to demonstrate that streaming modern games over home and even mobile Internet connections is viable with their immensely popular Game Pass Ultimate service, and NVIDIA is making similar inroads with GeForce Now. No, like so many of Google’s failed experiments, they’ve simply decided they don’t want to play anymore and are taking their proverbial ball home back with them.

But not all is lost for those who shelled out money for Stadia’s wares. Not only will Google be refunding any money players spent on games, but a company representative has also announced they will be releasing a tool to unlock the latent Bluetooth capabilities of the service’s custom controller — hopefully stemming a surge of e-waste before it starts.

In a forum thread titled “A Gift from the Stadia Team”, Community Manager [DanFromGoogle] explains that information on how you can enable Bluetooth on the controller will be coming next week. In the meantime, he also announced the immediate release of “Worm Game”, a tech demo that staffers apparently used to test out capabilities of the streaming service before its public release.

That this ridiculously simple game, which looks all the world like something a kid would crank out during an after-school programming class, will be the final title to officially release on Stadia is a stunningly insulting epitaph for the fledgling service. But then, Google seems to have developed a special affinity for mistreating their most loyal ~~cattle~~ users over these last few years.

Enabling Bluetooth on a game controller might not seem like such a big deal, but in this case, it will potentially give the piece of hardware a second chance at life. The Stadia controller is unique in that it uses WiFi to communicate directly over the Internet to Google’s streaming service, so once those servers stop responding, the orphaned device will end up being little more than a curiosity. Although it does technically work over USB, being able to use it wirelessly will not only provide a more modern experience, but help justify its internal batteries.

The last time we mentioned the Stadia controller, it was to document one user’s attempt to rid it of an internal microphone they didn’t feel comfortable with. Now that the service is being put to pasture, we wonder if we’ll start to see more hacks involving the admittedly interesting peripheral. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for them, but if you see anything we miss, you know where to send it.

A Flex Sensor For A Glove Controller Using An LDR

January 15, 2023 by Jenny List 14 Comments

When most of us think of glove controllers, the first which comes to mind is Nintendo’s PowerGlove, which promised much more than it delivered. But the idea persists, and from time to time we see them here at Hackaday. [Gord Payne] has one with an elegant sensor solution, it detects finger movement using a light dependent resistor.

The cleverest designs are those which are the simplest, and this one eschews complex mechanisms and exotic parts for a simple piece of flexible tube. At one end is an LED and at the other the LDR, and when attached to a glove it provides a finger sensor without the fuss. The amount of light reaching the LDR from the LED decreases as the pipe is bent, and with a simple divider circuit a voltage can be read by an Arduino. You can see it in action in the video below the break, where the glove flexing controls a servo.

Perhaps this might revitalize a bit of interest in glove controllers, something we probably don’t see too many of. Those Nintendo PowerGloves do still crop up from time to time though.

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Spaceballs Get Serialized

January 9, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 33 Comments

As much as we’d love a TV show version of the cult classic movie, we’re talking about a different kind of Spaceball. While there have been many iterations, [Evan] had a Spaceball built by a company known as Spacetec in 1991 and rebranded by HP. Being an older peripheral, he used the Orbotron 9001, a converter from RS232 serial to USB, to interface his Spaceball with modern devices.

The spaceball was one of the first 6 degrees of freedom controllers, useful for CAD and some games that supported it. It’s famous for being involved in the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission as it was used to control the Sojourner rover. In addition to the perfect orb, it also features eight handy buttons.

The Orbotron is a USB-capable microcontroller (Atmel SAMD21) designed to support the Spaceball 360, 4000, and 5000 series. Ultimately, after tinkering with the code to support the 2003 and 3003 Spaceballs, he had some reasonably usable with some rough edges. For example, acceleration curves still need tweaking, and going too fast can get you stuck. The downside was the rubber coating on the ball that had degraded over the years, making it horrendously sticky.

All the code changes are on GitHub. We’d love to see more spacemice integrated into things, like this ergonomic keyboard. Or even an open-source version of a spacemouse. After the break, we have a video of [Adafruit] showing a Spaceball 2003 working with a serial adapter.

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