Immersion: Video Game Biofeedback

January 31, 2014 by Marsh 16 Comments

immersionbiometrics

We’re not sure how scientific the following hack is, but it’s certainly interesting. Designer [Samuel Matson], interested in the correlation between gaming and stress, has pieced together a device that provides biofeedback during gameplay. He referenced this /r/gaming thread—which measured a player’s heart rate during a Halo session—as well as conducted his own tests that monitored the heart rate of gamers. After several iterations, [Samuel] had the above-pictured headset, which features the familiar and hackable pulse sensor placed by the earpiece.

The headset uses a TinyDuino and a Bluetooth TinyShield to communicate to the gamer’s computer in real time. He didn’t stop with simply monitoring heart rates, however; he integrated the signal into the game design. [Samuel] used indie-favorite game engine Unity3d to create a third-person shooter that reacts to the pulse sensor by raising the difficulty level when the player’s heart rate increases. It seems that his goal is to reduce or control stress among players, but we suspect inverting the model may be more effective: have the game cut you some slack when you’re stressed and present a challenge when you’re mellow.

[Thanks Ken]

Xbox One Headset 2.5 Mm Plug Adapter

December 11, 2013 by Todd Harrison 20 Comments

In all of Microsoft’s grand wisdom they found it necessary to make the new Xbox One headset adapter without a standard 2.5 mm headset jack. People have invested great amounts of money in quality headsets for previous game platforms that now cannot jack into the Xbox One controllers. This may seem like a déjà vu hack from a week ago but it is different and adds more solutions for the annoying Xbox One headset compatibility problem.

[Jon Senkiw] A.K.A [Xandrel] wasn’t having any of this Microsoft nonsense so he cracked open the headset adapter case that plugs into the Xbox One controller. He photographed the PCB and wiring and realized he could fit a 2.5 mm headset jack from an old donor cellphone into the case. A dap of hot glue, some AWG 30 jumper wires and a bit of plastic trimming was all it took to get a jack inside the headset adapter just the way Microsoft should have done from the factory.

Previously when [octanechicken] added a 2.5 mm female phone adapter at the end of the cable he did not connect the black wire to anything being it was the 2nd side of a push-pull speaker. However, from looking at [Jon’s] photos he connected the speaker output wire to a solder pad on the PCB where the black wire originally connected, marked HPL, and he had nothing connected to the HPR pad. This seemed to work for [Jon] just fine, but is the opposite of what [octanechicken] did last week when he connected the blue wire to the speaker output which would have traced back to the HPR pad on the PCB.

This hack makes these controllers backwards compatible without too much issue being reported. If you have issues please report here or on [Jon’s] SE7ENSINS thread. He has also made comments on the thread that he is willing to help mod headsets, so if you’re not able to hack this yourself [Jon] might be willing to help.

Using XBox One And PS4 Controllers With Everything

December 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The controllers from the last generation of consoles served their purpose well. They were there for us when we wanted to experiment with an I2C bus, and they stood by when we wanted to build a quadcopter out of parts just lying around. A new generation of consoles is now upon us, and with them come new controllers. Controllers for which Arduino libraries haven’t been written yet. The horror.

Until those libraries are developed, there’s ChronusMAX, a USB dongle that allows you to use XBox One controllers on a PS4, PS4 controllers on the XBox, mice and keyboards on both systems, and both types of controllers on your PC.

The folks behind ChronusMAX put up a video demoing the XBox One controller working on the 360, PS3, and PC, with another video showing the same for the PS4 controller. As far as what we can see from the PC demos, everything on these controllers can be read, right down to the accelerometer data on the DualShock 4.

Although this is a commercial product, we’re surprised we haven’t seen a more open version by now. From the looks of it, it’s a very small device with two USB ports and a firmware upload utility. Microcontrollers with two native USB ports are usually encased in large packages, so there might be some very clever engineering in this device. Let us know when someone does a teardown of one of these.

Thanks [Josh] for sending this one in.

2.5 Mm Jack Adapter For The Xbox One Headset

November 30, 2013 by Todd Harrison 11 Comments

As most everyone knows the Xbox One came out last week and if you were one of the lucky few to get one you might have noticed the headset is quite uncomfortable and covers only one ear. [octanechicken] has a possible adapter solution that lets you plug-in an older more comfortable chat headset like a Turtle Beach. It is being reported as a functional hack by others in the comments; however it may still be questionable. We say questionable because the first release of this Instructable clearly had a flaw in the wiring, but updated text seems to have fixed that problem. Using a female 2.5 mm stereo inline jack [octanechicken] was able to get the Xbox One headset controller to work with older Xbox 360 chat headsets having a male 2.5 mm plug.

The photos on the instructable are still incorrect so following the text instructions one simply unsolders the wires from within the ear piece and then solders the white wire to the tip connector, blue wire to the middle ring connector and the bare wire to the rear sleeve connector of the female 2.5 mm stereo inline jack. Remember to leave the black wire disconnected and covered with a bit of tape. If you cut the wires instead of unsoldering them, remember to scrape any varnish off before soldering. But what about that black wire?

Continue reading “2.5 Mm Jack Adapter For The Xbox One Headset” →

Posterior Posture Videogame Controller

November 19, 2013 by Todd Harrison 6 Comments

Normally we see some crazy mad science projects coming from [Ben Krasnow’s] laboratory. This week [Ben] changes gears a bit and hacks his Xbox controller to interface with his bathroom scale and function as a posture controlled input device. You may want to take a moment for that to tumble around in your noggin before we trying to explain. What this means is you sit catawampus on a bathroom scale and when you lean forward your game character moves forward, lean back your character backs up and lean side to side for strafe left and right.

A modern digital bathroom scale has four pressure point transducers — one in each corner — which are read by the central controller and summed to generate the weight of the object setting on the scale. To use the scale as a controller input [Ben] removed the central scale controller and created two amplified Wheatstone bridge differential circuits, one for each diagonal axis between load cells. After adding an offset potentiometer to fix the resting point at 0.8 volts, the amplified differential voltage signals are fed directly into an Xbox controller’s thumb stick input for game control.

Additionally, to add rotation to his new game controller he hacked a an old ball type mouse and added a bit of rubber tubing that contacted and tracked the base of a Lazy Susan platter. The scale sits on the Lazy Susan and allows for the partial rotation of your torso to controlled game rotation. However, [Ben] still needed a regular mouse interfaced with the game for full 360° rotation control.

There is more after the break, plus the build and demonstration video.

Continue reading “Posterior Posture Videogame Controller” →

Xbox 360 Light Right And RF Module Connected To Raspberry Pi

July 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

rpi-connected-to-xbox-lightring

If you want to mess around with your Xbox 360 controllers on a computer Microsoft would be happy to sell you a USB dongle to do so. But [Tino] went a different route. The board that drives the Xbox 360’s status light ring also includes the RF module that wirelessly connects the controllers. He wired this up to his Raspberry Pi using the GPIO header.

The module connects via an internal cable and is treated much like a USB device by the Xbox motherboard. The problem is that it won’t actually handle the 5V rail found on a USB connector; it wants 3.3V. But this is no problem for the RPi’s pin header. Once a few connections have been made the lights are controlled via ~~SPI~~ I2C and [Tino] posted some example code up on Github to work with the RF module. He plans to post a follow-up that interfaces the module with a simple microcontroller rather than an RPi board. If you can’t wait for that we’re sure you can figure out the details you need by digging through his example code.

Brute Force Attack Xbox 360 Parental Controls

July 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

brute-force-xbox-360-parental-controls

The Xbox 360 has the option of parental controls. It limits the rating of games which can be played on the system. [Oscar] didn’t really need to remove the lock-out. It was simply an interesting proof of concept for him. In the image above he’s holding up a Vinciduino board. It has an ATmega32u4 chip that can brute-force attack the Xbox 360 parental code (translated).

We’ve seen quite a few of these attacks lately. Like the recent iPad pin attack this uses the microcontroller to emulate a keyboard. As you can see in the video, [Oscar] first navigates the menu system to the unlock code screen, then plugs in his device.

The unlock screen calls for a four-digit numeric PIN. That’s a total of 10000 possible combinations. It looks pretty slow in the demo, but according to his calculations the worst case scenario would still break the code in less than seventeen hours. Apparently there’s no lock-out for the max number of wrong codes.

Continue reading “Brute Force Attack Xbox 360 Parental Controls” →