Xbox 360 Controller Mod For A Friend In Need

March 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 30 Comments

xbox_controller_external_button_mod

[Adrian] has a friend that, due to an accident, can no longer play Xbox games in the standard fashion. His friend is unfortunately unable to hold the game pad properly, and no longer has the manual dexterity to reach the shoulder buttons and triggers on the top side of his Xbox 360 controller. Being the good guy that he is, he set out to see what he could do in order to bring the joy of playing Xbox back into his friend’s life.

Inspired by the many different gaming mods he has seen [Ben Heck] construct, he pulled apart an Xbox 360 wireless controller and began to investigate how the four top buttons were activated. In no time, he had four large buttons wired to the PCB where the triggers and shoulder buttons once connected.

[Adrian] mentions that his modification isn’t quite complete, as he is going to mount the buttons into a board which can easily be laid on his friend’s lap or a table. The only thing we are left wondering is whether or not he was able to replicate the analog functionality of the triggers, or if they are treated as simple on/off switches. Either way, we are sure his friend will be thrilled!

Kinect To Get Windows Drivers Months After Open Source Drivers Were Developed

February 22, 2011 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Microsoft is planning to release Windows drivers for the Kinect this spring, months after open source drivers were developed by a motivated hacking community. [Johnny Chung Lee], who worked with the Microsoft team when the hardware was developed, mentions that he had pushed for the giant to develop and release at least basic Windows drivers. That refusal led him to a position as top cheerleader and bounty contributor in Adafruit’s Open Kinect Contest which resulted (quickly we might add) in the availability of open source drivers. If you’ve been following Hackaday or any other tech blogs the last three months you’ll know that an explosion of projects using the Kinect followed, and [Johnny] figures Microsoft’s decision to release Windows drivers is an attempt to ride this wave on their own flagship OS rather than continue to watch from the sidelines.

Shotgun Blast Lights Up Your Controller

February 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Jrfhoutx] makes gaming in the dark a bit easier with this backlight shotgun shell d-pad for an Xbox 360 controller. He’s building on another tutorial he posted showing how to use the brass base of a shotgun shell to replace the stock plastic direction pad. That hack uses most of the original plastic part, cutting it down a bit and capping it off with the shell base. But now he’s detailing the process used to add LEDs around the base. He picked surface mount 0603 packages which are first chained together, then held in place using hot glue. While you’re in there, give this rapid-fire mod a try as well.

Automating Automatic Racing

February 2, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

Hackaday forum user [Nikescar] upgraded his XBox360 hard drive. During this upgrade, his Forza 3 game save was lost. He had accumulated millions of in-game dollars and really wanted to get back to where he was. We’re not familiar with the game, but he says that one easy way to make some money is to allow the AI to run races for you while you do other things. Unfortunately, this requries coming back to the system and starting a new race every hour or so. Luckily, [Nikescar] had an arduino lying around doing nothing, so he patched it into the controller and had it carry out a the correct button press sequence on a schedule. Now his virtual driver makes virtual money while his virtual-person keeps it going. His real person sleeps.

VR! Now With More Kinect, Wiimote, And Vuzix

January 25, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

Those of us that remember when you could actually go to a mall and play on a VR game machine, tend to remember it fondly. What happened? The computing horsepower has grown so much, our graphics now days are simply stunning, yet there’s been no major VR revival. Yeah, those helmets were huge and gave you a headache, but it was worth it. With the 3d positioning abilities of the latest game crazes, the Wiimote and the Kinect, [Nao_u] is finally taking this where we all knew it should have gone(google translated). Well, maybe we would have had less creepy anime faces flying around squirting ink, but the basics are there. He has created a VR system utilizing the Wiimote for his hand position, a Vuzix display for head positioning, and the kinect for body tracking. Even with the creepy flying heads I want to play it, especially after seeing him physically ducking behind boxes in the video after the break. Long live VR!

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Kinect Open Source Driver Demo And Hacking

November 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

The competition for the first Open Source driver for the Kinect is heating up. [Marcan42] has released a driver that does video and depth. He was able to do this without an Xbox and you can see it in action after the break. [LadyAda] has been hard at work as well, recording and dumping the data, and even writing a “hello world” that utilizes the motors in the Kinect.
We don’t know for sure how [Marcan42] recorded his data, but we can see [Ladyada] is using a high speed Beagle USB 480 to record the data going both ways between the Xbox360 and the Kinect. That’s the kind of toy we would like to have sitting around. For those who don’t know what all the fuss is about, there’s a contest to see who can get an open source driver out there first. The prize has grown every time Microsoft says something bad about it.

[thanks Rapps]

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Kilobuck Open Kinect Project Prize

November 4, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 83 Comments

Full of video and audio sensors, the newly released Kinect is Microsoft’s answer to Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus and Sony’s PlayStation Move. Now there is money up for grabs to hack it. Adafruit is offering up a one thousand dollar prize to open source the driver for the Kinect. What do they want this driver to do? They want RGB and distance values. We’re excited to see the hacks that will come around because of this product, and now that prize money is involved, everything has been turned up a notch.

Update: The bounty has been raised to $2000 after a Microsoft response to CNET:

But Microsoft isn’t taking kindly to the bounty offer. “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products,” a company spokesperson told CNET. “With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

Update: Progress toward a driver
Update: Winner of the Open Source Kinect contest