Bartop Arcade Honors Aspect With 4:3 IPad Screen

December 5, 2015 by Adam Fabio 16 Comments

Let’s face it, we all love arcades, but not all of us can fit a full size stand-up in our homes. [Bentika] knew the solution was a bartop style cabinet, but it had to be designed and built to his specifications. You see, he’s a bit of an aspect ratio nerd. Only a proper 4:3 screen would do for emulating games designed for just such a display. Modern 4:3 displays are hard to come by, unless of course you have an iPad handy. The 1024 x 768 screens used on the early model iPads are perfect for the task.

Driving these screens used to be a chore, but thanks to hacker reverse engineering and overseas manufacturing, these days, controllers are only a few clicks away. [Bentika] ordered a controller for the iPad 1 screen from eBay. What he got was a controller that only worked with the iPad 2 screen. Thankfully he had a pile of old iPads to play with, so it wasn’t an issue.

[Bentika] designed his cabinet using AutoDesk 123D based upon a basic outline provided by [Joshendy]. His final cut patters were created with Adobe Illustrator. He was able to get the entire cabinet laser cut for around $160, including materials. Cabinet assembly was easy, thanks to plenty of square gussets used to align the various pieces.

The controller for this arcade is of course a Raspberry Pi 2 running RetroPie. [Bentika] used a control block to interface the joystick and buttons to the Pi itself. RetroPie lends itself to “keyboardless” operation, he didn’t have to bring any of the Pi’s USB ports outside the case.

We have to say the final results are very nice. This system has all the portability of a CRT based bartop setup without the weight. You can check out more discussion of this hack over on Reddit, or click past the break for the video.

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Increasing Cable Length In Precision Video Applications

December 4, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 23 Comments

Transmitting video signals over long distances can be tricky. Cheap co-ax cables won’t do the job. You either need amplifiers along the path, or need to use expensive, high quality shielded co-ax cables – both of which can end up costing a lot. [Maurizio] built a low cost solution to transmit video over long distances using twisted pair cables.

The system is cheap and uses readily available parts. The idea is to convert the video signal into a differential output using a pair of op amps and transmit them over a pair of twisted pair wires, then extract the signal at the receiving end using another amplifier.

A differential amplifier usually requires a dual-polarity power supply, which may not be available when adding this upgrade to an existing system. To over come this limitation, [Maurizio] uses a bias voltage equal to half of the power supply value. This bias voltage is added to the non-inverting amplifier signal, and subtracted from the inverting amplifier signal. The resultant differential signal is then fed into the twisted pair cable through impedance matching resistors. At the receiving end, a single amplifier receives the differential signals and outputs a signal that corresponds to the original video signal.

This symmetrical configuration renders the system immune to external noise. The design was tested for transmitting video on inexpensive CAT-3 twisted pair wire. According to him, when transmitting on 300m of wire, good quality color video was displayed on a monitor with an NTSC input. He used LMH6643 op-amps for this experiment, but other devices with similar characteristics can be used. Here’s a useful PDF document that discusses signals, cables and connections.

If you want to check out more of [Maurizio]’s work, see how he figured out how to send serial data from Excel.

Video Standards Are More Than Video Signals

November 19, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 78 Comments

The number of hours we spend staring at screens is probably best unknown, but how about the technology that makes up the video on the screen? We’ve all seen a reel-to-reel projector on TV or in a movie or maybe you’re old enough to have owned one, surely some of you still have one tucked away real nice. Whether you had the pleasure of operating a projector or just watched it happen in the movies the concept is pretty straight forward. A long piece of film which contains many individual frames pass in front of a high intensity lamp while the shutter hides the film movement from our eyes and our brain draws in the imaginary motion from frame to frame. Staring at a Blu-ray player won’t offer the same intuition, while we won’t get into what must the painful detail of decoding video from a Blu-ray Disc we will look into a few video standards, and how we hack them.

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Video With Sensor Data Overlay Via Arduino Mega

November 11, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 17 Comments

If you haven’t been paying attention, big wheel trikes are a thing. There are motor driven versions as well as OG pedal pushing types . [Flux Axiom] is of the OG (you only get one link, now its on you) flavor and has written an instructable that shows how to achieve some nice looking on screen data that he syncs up with the video for a professional looking finished product which you can see in the video after the break.

[Flux Axiom] is using an Arduino Mega in his setup along with a cornucopia of sensors and all their data is being logged onto an SD card. All the code used in his setup is available in his GitHub repository. [Flux Axiom] was also nice enough to include the calibration process he used for the sensors which is also located in the GitHub download.

Sadly [Flux Axiom] uses freedom hating software for combining the video and data, Race Render 3 is his current solution and he is pleased with the results. Leave it in the comments if you have an open source solution for combining the video and data that we can offer him as a replacement.

Edit: Correct spelling of handle.

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Converting Live 2D Video To 3D

November 7, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Here’s some good news for all the fools who thought 3D TV was going to be the next big thing back in 2013. Researchers at MIT have developed a system that converts 2D video into 3D. The resulting 2D video can be played on an Oculus Rift, a Google Cardboard, or even that 3D TV sitting in the living room.

Right now, the system only works on 2D broadcasts of football, but this is merely a product of how the researchers solved this problem. The problem was first approached by looking at screencaps of the game FIFA 13. Using an analysis tool called PIX, the researchers both stored the display data and extracted the corresponding 3D map of the pitch, players, ball, and stadium. To generate 3D video of a 2D football broadcast, the system then looks at every frame of the 2D broadcast and searches for a 3D dataset that corresponds to the action on the field. This depth information is then added to the video feed, producing a 3D broadcast using only traditional 2D cameras.

Grab your red and blue filter shades and check out the product of their research below.

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Digging HDMI Out Of UDP Packets

November 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

[Danman] was looking for a way to get the HDMI output from a camera to a PC so it could be streamed over the Internet. This is a task usually done with HDMI capture cards, either PCI or even more expensive USB 3.0 HDMI capture boxes. In his searches, [danman] sumbled across an HDMI extender that transmitted HDMI signals over standard Ethernet. Surely there must be a way to capture this data and turn it back.

The extender boxes [danman] found at everyone’s favorite chinese reseller were simple – just an Ethernet port, HDMI jack, and a power connector – and cheap – just $70 USD. After connecting the two boxes to his network and setting up his camera, [danman] listened in to the packets being set with Wireshark. The basic protocol was easy enough to grok, but thanks to the Chinese engineers and an IP header that was the wrong length, [danman] had to listen to the raw socket.

Once everything was figured out, [danman] was able to recover raw frames from the HDMI extenders, recover the audio, and stream everything to his PC with VLC. All the code is available, and if you’re looking for a way to stream HDMI to multiple locations on a network, you won’t find a better solution that’s this cheap.

Is It A Haunted House Or A Video Game?

October 31, 2015 by Al Williams 4 Comments

[Rich Fiore] didn’t want just another set of spooky decorations for his house. He wanted something interactive. By combining a projector and some IR sensing, he turned his whole house into a Halloween-themed shooter.

Technical details are sparse, although some other sites are reporting that a projector and a camera take care of the graphics, while a modified Wii remote and an IR gun handle the crosshairs and the targeting.

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