Gotta Catch ‘Em All, With An Arduino

January 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

PKMN

For every pokemon you encounter on your adventure to become the world’s greatest trainer, you have about a 1 in 8000 chance of that pokemon being ‘shiny’, or a different color than normal. Put an uncommon event in any video game, and of course a few people will take that feature to the limits of practicality: [dekuNukem] c reated the Poke-O-Matic , a microcontroller-powered device that breeds and captures shiny pokemon.

We’ve seen [dekuNukem]’s setup for automatically catching shiny pokemon before, but the previous version was extremely limited. It only worked with a fishing rod, so unless you want a ton of shiny Magikarp the earlier setup wasn’t extremely useful.

This version uses two microcontrollers – an Arduino Micro and a Teensy 3.0 – to greatly expand upon the previous build. Now, instead of just fishing, [dekuNukem]’s project can automatically hatch eggs, search patches of grass for shiny pokemon, and also automatically naming these new shiny pokemon and depositing them in the in-game pokemon storage system.

The new and improved version works a lot like the older fishing-only automated pokemon finder; a few wires soldered on to the button contacts control the game. The Teensy 3.0 handles the data logging of all the captured pokemon with an SD card and RTC.

What did [dekuNukem] end up with for all his effort? A lot of shiny pokemon. More than enough to build a great team made entirely out of shinies.

Video below, with all the code available through a link in the description.

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Finding Shiny Pokemon Automatically

November 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

In case you’re not up to speed with the world of Pokemon, nearly every species of this game’s titular creatures have a ‘shiny’ variety – a differently colored sprite for each pokemon. As far as gameplay goes, they’re exactly the same as their non-shiny brethren, but the shiny varieties are so impossibly rare not many players have seen them. [dekuNukem] over on Youtube has come up with a great way to find these shiny Pokemon automatically with the Hackaday reader’s favorite tools – an Arduino and a few parts from Sparkfun.

The build hinges on the fact that all shiny pokemon have a short animation whenever the player encounters them in the wild. This setup uses a fishing rod, so an Arduino Micro first presses the Y button to cast the rod, while the ‘duinos ADC listens to the audio signal until a bite is indicated.

A light sensor taped to the bottom screen of the 3DS then measures the amount of time the screen is blacked out. The extra animation for every shiny pokemon means this blackout period is about half a second longer. If the Arduino doesn’t see a shiny, it ‘runs away’, but if a shiny is detected a buzzer sounds to tell the extremely lazy pokemon trainer they have a shiny on their line.

From the video, it took about 36 minutes to find a single shiny pokemon, and about 8 shinies in the three hours of testing this rig has under its belt.

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Hackaday Links: April 18, 2012

April 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

Sandcasting at the beach

[mkb] sent in a video he found of [Max Lamb] sandcasting a stool at a beach in England. The material is pewter, or >90% tin with a little bit copper and antimony thrown in for good measure. While we’re sure there will be a few complaints from environmentalists, it’s still a cool video to see.

Your project needs an OLED display

Here’s a Kickstarter for a tiny 96×16 OLED display. Connect this thing to any I2C bus and you get a 15×2 character display (or a graphic display if that’s your inclination) very easily. Thanks to [Chris] for sending this one in.

Here’s one for a larf

[Ryan Inman] is suing 20 companies because he got mercury poisoning from vacuum tubes. Read that last line again. Most of the companies that sell antique/repro/hard-to-find components like Angela Instruments, Antique Electronic Supply, and even eBay are listed as defendants in the case. This might put at least one company out of business ~~even though they never sold [Ryan] a vacuum tube~~ edit: they did sell him a neon bulb, and courts are generally idiotic when it comes to technological issues. It’s hilarious and sad, so we’ll keep you updated if we get more info.

Nostalgia, the pain from an old wound

The Adafruit blog posted an excellent piece on the Apple ][ game Rocky’s Boots, an educational game from 1982 that teaches kids how to connect logic gates. You can play this game in your browser, but we’d like to hear our stories of ancient video games that teach you engineering concepts like The Incredible Machine or Widget Workshop. Leave a note in the comments if we’re leaving any out.

A question posed to the community

A company is giving away credit card readers that plug into the headphone jack of an iDevice. [J Smith] writes in to ask us if anyone has gotten one of these and opened them up. Like [J Smith] we’re expecting something a repeat of the CueCat where free hardware is opened up to everybody. If you’ve done a teardown of one of these card readers, send it in.

3DS homebrew

[Mike] sent us a link to [neimod]’s Flickr photostream. It looks like we’re on the cusp of tearing open the Nintendo 3DS for homebrew apps. Someone who uses this much hot glue must know what they’re doing, right?

Hackaday Links: January 24, 2012

January 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Open source engraving

[Scott] wanted to do some v-carving with a CNC router, but couldn’t find software to generate GCode that didn’t cost hundreds of dollars. He ended up doing the sensible thing and wrote his own that will generate tool paths from CXF fonts. We’ll be bookmarking this for when our router project is done.

Improving Genesis sound output

Dissatisfied with the sound output on his Sega Genesis, [Drakon] installed a few mods into his console. How much could it really affect the sound? Listen to the video. The changeover happens at 0:50. Impressive. Now if only the chiptune scene would get into Segas.

Yes, we did, and now we’re seeding

Here’s an alternative to Thingiverse: The Pirate Bay has a new category for 3D-printable objects. The best file so far? A 1970 Chevelle. US Copyright law does not protect (most) physical objects, so it’s not illegal. Honestly, we can’t wait for somebody to take this to the courts; It’s sure to be an interesting case. Somebody upload a ship hull design and give the EFF a buzz.

Just be glad it’s not a QFN

[Mikey] was pulling a PDIP ATMega8 out of a socket with pliers and a screwdriver and broke the RESET pin. Ouch. He fixed it by soldering on a lead from a resistor. We’ve all done this before, but [Mikey]’s results look really good. Here’s the gallery.

This might be fake

If you want a second analog stick for your 3DS, you could wait a month and buy a Circle Pad Pro, or install a PSP analog stick. We’re not sure how this would work – the Circle Pad Pro works over IR, and we’re not seeing an IR transmitter on this build. Here’s the source if anyone wants to give this a shot.

Nintendo 3DS Teardown

March 3, 2011 by Chris Nelson 14 Comments

The Nintendo 3DS has been out for a couple days now (in japan) and the folks over at [tech on] were nice enough to do a teardown. Besides all the regular teardown goodies you can also get a good look at the 3DS’ 3D screen with a microscope. Turns out its a parallax barrier display which means that there are slits on top of the LED array to create a 3D effect without the use of special glasses. The rest of the hardware seems pretty standard, running an ARM based processor with some DRAM and NAND flash. Apparently the 3DS didn’t get much of an upgrade (downgrade?) as far as DRM is concerned because there are already examples of the 3DS running pirated games using a R4 card on youtube.

[via engaget]

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