Building A Modular Joystick For Star Citizen

July 21, 2022 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

Joysticks are great for gaming, but sometimes it’s hard to find one that suits your personal playstyle. [Nixie] developed the TinkerJoy to suit their own needs, while giving it a modular design to make it easy to customize as well.

It’s built around a metal core, with 3D printed panels attached to the user’s liking. In addition to the body panels, parts like the trigger assembly and button panels can be moved around and adjusted to suit different games or different players.

A test unit has been built in a right-handed configuration, featuring four buttons and two switch sliders. In addition to the main X and Y axes, it also has a Z axis activated by twisting the joystick, as well as an analog brake. There’s a trigger, too, as every good joystick must have. For now, the electronics is not integrated. Instead, a STM32 BluePill board sits on top of the stick to read all the controls and talk to a PC. The test setup looks to work well, with [Nixie] putting the gear through its paces in Star Citizen.

The benefit of building your own hardware is that you can often do ergonomics better yourself. After all, companies often have to build for the 5th-95th percentile for reasons of economics and scale.

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Pi Pico Provides Practical PlayStation Pointing

July 12, 2022 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

It’s not immediately clear to us why one would need a mouse for the original PlayStation (though we’re sure there’s no shortage of folks eager to jump down into the comments and tell us), but if you ever desire adding improved pointing capabilities to the nearly three decade old console, this project from [Vojtěch Salajka] is certainly one to keep an eye on.

The aptly named “USB to PlayStation Mouse” project does exactly what it sounds like — adapts a generic USB mouse into an input device for Sony’s classic console. Putting one together requires a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 5 V DC-DC USB boost module with female USB-A connector, and a sacrificial controller or peripheral to provide the cable and proprietary connector.

With the hardware assembled per the simple wiring diagram, you just plug the Pico into your computer and copy over the firmware file. [Vojtěch] notes that you’ll need to unplug the mouse before attempting to upload the firmware, presumably because the data pins on the two USB ports have been tied together.

Don’t worry about having to find some obscure title to try out your new peripheral either, [Vojtěch] says the mouse works in the system’s main menu if you boot it without a disc in the drive. Now all you need is a few Raspberry Pi Pico PlayStation Memory Cards to complete the whole set.

A clock with a VFD display in an orange TV-like case

Never Miss An Email With This 1970s Style Desktop Notifier

July 5, 2022 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

If you like the 1970s aesthetic but think bell-bottoms, big hair and psychedelic wallpaper are a bit too much in this day and age, you might want to have a look at [Pierre Muth]’s latest build, The Absurd Notifier. It’s a useful desk accessory that adds just a little bit of ’70s flair to your office: housed inside what looks like an orange TV standing on shiny metal feet is a little gadget that can tell you if you’ve got important email messages waiting or an appointment coming up.

[Pierre] built the system around a Garmin Vivosmart 3 smartwatch that he bought very cheaply because it had a broken display. The display’s pinout and protocol were of course undocumented, so [Pierre] hooked up his logic analyzer to try and figure out how it worked. It turned out to be a simple SPI setup, and with a bit of trial and error he was able to extract the images that the watch was sending out.

To replace the broken screen, [Pierre] turned to some 128×64 pixel VFD displays that he had left over from an earlier project. Their resolution was exactly the same as the Garmin’s original OLED display, but their interface wasn’t: the VFDs expected 115k2 serial data. Programming a PIC microcontroller with an SPI port on one side and a UART port on the other made for a simple bridge between the two.

[Pierre] then designed and 3D printed a case reminiscent of a 1970s TV, with matching bright orange color. The end result is a funky little retro clock that shows notifications on a vintage green display. If you like desktop notifiers, we seen several neat ones alerting their owners about things ranging from new YouTube subscribers to the ISS passing by.

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It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.

June 30, 2022 by Jenny List 38 Comments

There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB floppy drives. Yes, taking one of the smallest and most unreliable pieces of data storage media and combining a load of them together such that all the data is lost if just one of them fails.

Surprisingly the process of creation is quicker and simplier than we expected, with a slightly long-in-the-tooth version of Mac OS X making short work of the process. Starting with 30 USB floppies and a pair of large USB hubs, he whittled the pile down to 13 drives that would play nicely and RAID together. The sight of so many drives all lighting up together as the precious megabytes are filled with data is probably not one seen outside the realm of floppy duplication machines, which brings back bad memories for those of us in the consumer software business in years past.

Would you do this? Probably, but should you do it? Of course not, but then again he’s done it so the rest of us don’t have to. Here in 2022 maybe there are better uses for a brace of floppy drives. Continue reading “It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.” →

Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: Miniature Steel Drums Become Rotary Mouse Controllers

June 29, 2022 by Robin Kearey 3 Comments

When [bornach] browsed through his office’s free-cycling box he found an old novelty toy that lets you play simple tunes on miniature steel drums. Such a thing is probably fun for about five minutes – if it’s working, which this one wasn’t. But instead of throwing it away, [bornach] spotted an opportunity in the capacitive touch pads on top of those little drums: they looked perfect to be modified into an unusual mouse cursor controller.

The operation started with [bornach] ripping out the original PCB and replacing it with an ESP32 D1 Mini. That board has a handy stack of touch-sensitive pins which could interface directly with the drums’ touch pads. He then programmed the ESP32 to interpret the signals as mouse movements and button presses, and send the results to a computer through a BlueTooth connection.

Operating the mouse drums is so straightforward that they almost appear made for this purpose: you slide your finger in circles along the touch pads to move the cursor in the X or Y direction, and touch the center pad to click. The left drum moves the cursor horizontally while the right one moves it vertically, but there’s also a mode to use the right drum as a scroll wheel.

The rotary X/Y controls are reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch; while probably too clumsy for everyday use, they might come in handy in some circumstances where you need to make single-pixel-accurate motions, if only to click those miniscule “close” buttons on some online ads.

Amazingly, this isn’t the first Etch-a-Sketch style mouse we’ve featured: this cute little wooden device works in a similar way.

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a 3D-rendered image of a PCB with several knobs and buttons

Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: The LowPow ShortKeyboard Can Work On Your Desk Or Out In The Field

June 28, 2022 by Robin Kearey 1 Comment

For some power users, the one-hundred-and-something keys on regular keyboards just aren’t enough for their everyday tasks. Macro keypads are a popular way of extending one’s input capabilities, and there are almost as many examples as there are power users. [Ulrich]’s latest project, dubbed the LowPow E-Ink ShortKeyboard, is a beautiful and meticulously documented design for a macro pad that includes several unusual features.

Built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, the ShortKeyboard features nine programmable function keys plus an analog joystick and a rotary encoder. The keys are based on Cherry MX RED types commonly seen in mechanical keyboards, illuminated from below by by miniature RGB LEDs. A big e-ink display in the middle can be used to show the function of each key.

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Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: RoenDi Smart Knob Thinks Outside The Box

June 27, 2022 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

When it comes to design decisions, we’re often advised to “think outside the box.” It’s generally good advice, if a bit abstract — it could really mean anything. But it appears that someone took it quite literally with this nifty little smart knob display and input device.

[Dimitar]’s inspiration for RoenDi — for “rotary encoder and display” — came from an unusual source: a car dashboard, and specifically, the multipurpose knobs that often crop up in a car’s climate control cluster. Designed for ease of use while driving while causing as little distraction as possible, such knobs often combine a rotary encoder with one or more indicators or buttons. RoenDi builds on that theme by putting a 1.7″ round LCD display in the middle of a ring attached to an Alps rotary encoder, allowing the knob to be customized for whatever you want it to represent. The backplane sports a powerful STM32 microcontroller with a lot of the GPIO pins broken out, so customization and interfacing are limited only by your imagination. The design is open source, so you can either build your own or support the project via Crowd Supply.

Unlike the haptic smart knob we’ve been seeing a bit about lately, which also features a round LCD at its center, RoenDi’s feedback is via the physical detents on the encoder. We think both devices are great, and they fill different niches in the novel input ecosystem.

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