Packshotnik: 360 Degree Image Creation

April 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 34 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk7_XRgxCas]

Packshotnik is a circuit designed to help with creating 360 degree images. It consists of a main board and motorized rotating platform. The board can send IR signals to a camera to snap pictures at intervals in the rotation. The source code, schematic, and pcb files are all available from the project page. While he is using this primarily for rotating 360 degree images, you could also just plop your camera onto the platform and end up with panoramic sets.

360 Degree Video For Next-to-nothing

January 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

[Luis], a regular Hackaday reader, sent in some info about his 360 degree video experiments. He wanted a cheap device to use with a video camera, producing video that can be displayed using a free Flash software library.

The hardware consists of a mirrored light bulb, a square of glass, and some threaded rod. The camera lens attaches to the glass with the rod right in the middle. The lens will capture a donut image reflected in the mirror of the bulb. [Luis] then processes the result and uses Ryubin’s Flash Panorama to handle playback. He’s posted two clips as examples, the first of an “Existentialist Suburb Walker” and the second is some test footage while setting up for a shot. You can click-and-rotate the video while it’s playing to look around the area.

This could produce some great driving videos, without the need for multiple cameras. [Luis] does point out some problems with oscillation as the mirror on the end of a rod will amplify the effect of movement on the image.

Xbox 360 Controller On NES

November 30, 2009 by Jake W 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzW0JAx2lFM]

Some may think that linking an Xbox 360 controller to an original NES console is overkill. [Francois] would not count him self among that group. When the robotics team at his school was done using the controller with one of their projects, [Francois] used a Cortex M3 processor to get it to run with one of Nintendo’s 8-bit consoles. Part of the code for using the controller with the robot and the NES is available. Now all that is left is being able to play Duck Hunt with a Sixaxis controller.

FiSSION 3D Game Engine For Wii Homebrew

January 31, 2009 by Eliot 36 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd1DrN2PDt4]

[PunMaster] wrote in to tell us that he has just released the first public demo of FiSSION Project. It’s a homebrew 3D game engine for the Wii. He’s hoping it will make development easier for other people that want to get into the Wii hacking scene. The project was originally spun out of similar work he was doing targeted at XNA for the 360. This is just a demo to generate interest in the project and hopefully get some feedback as to what’s needed to make a full release possible.

Xbox 360 Jasper In The Wild

December 11, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

jasper_5

[Ben Heck] has written up what he calls a “super unboxing” of the new jasper Xbox 360. The “jasper” refers to a new graphics processor that is supposed to be smaller and more reliable. They have been hard to find, but [Ben] shows us how to spot them. Simply look at the sticker on the back of the unit that shows voltage/current. If it uses 12.1 Amps instead of 14.2, it has the jasper.

Xbox 360 Jasper Motherboards

November 28, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

xbox360

The Xbox 360 has a brand new motherboard. Dubbed the Jasper, it presumably has a new 65nm process GPU. The new box has a 150W power supply instead of the former’s 175W brick. They’ve changed the plug design to prevent usage with old consoles. The most notable change is the onboard flash memory upgrade. Earlier consoles only had 16MB; new ones have 256MB. The majority of this storage will be used for the new dashboard, the NXE. The remaining space can be used for game saves. With the new storage, Arcade units are no longer including memory cards. You can see more images of the boards on Xbox-Scene.

Slot Loading Xbox 360

November 22, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

File this one under: “Wow, that’s even possible?” xbox-scene hacker [RDC] has been hard at work converting his Xbox 360 to slot loading. To start, He removed the slot loading drive from a blueberry iMac G3. The loading mechanism is the top half of the drive. He split this off and married it to the reading mechanism in the Xbox’s Hitachi drive. The difficult part came with getting the drive to properly signal when it had a disc. He put together a custom circuit to do the detection and has a thorough description of how he solved the problem.

[Thanks, bic]