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

Xbox 360 Hard Drive Adapter (redux)

July 19, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 24 Comments

[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive’s warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own and ended up succeeding with a board that costs less than $1 in parts. Of course the drive uses its own Fat32 based file system so there is still some hacking to do if you intended to read the data, but this is a step in the right direction.

GPU Cooling To Fix RRoD

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 64 Comments

[Rbz] fixed his friend’s Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he removed it and screwed a cooling fan to the GPU heat sink. That did the trick, so he moved the drive to the outside of the case with the aid of a longer SATA cable. It’s not pretty, but it worked.

Xbox 360 Laptop More Laptop-y Than Ever

March 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

[TheTwoJ] and his friend built a laptop-form-factor Xbox 360. Their extensively documented process was inspired by [Ben Heckendorn’s] work. The result is a brick when folded up but a good-looking (albeit loud with 8 fans) gaming rig. There’s everything you would expect; LCD screen, integrated WiFi, camera, optical drive, and a full keyboard. These poor saps seem to have spent a portion of their student loan on the build but we understand how easy it is to let your budget get out of hand. They’re trying to recoup through eBay auction.

Take a look at the walk through after the break. If you’ve got the spare dough, you can try your hand at this with our three part series on building an Xbox 360 laptop.

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