Salad Spinner Busts Some New Moves

September 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Can you believe that [Tom Tilley]’s wife was just going to pawn off this perfectly good salad spinner on the thrift store when it’s so ripe for hacking? We couldn’t, either. Fortunately, he caught it just in time, right before dinner.

One of the coolest things a person can do that also tends to aid gameplay is to make a custom controller. [Tom] decided to make one for Bust-A-Move, a simple game where one shoots balls at bubbles in order to pop them. It looks like quite the fun little stress reducer. Anyway, a simple game deserves a simple controller, no? Yes.

As you’ll see in the build/demo video below, [Tom] started with a standard wireless mouse and hot-glued a cardboard origami creation to it. This goes upside-down inside the salad spinner and gets connected to the spinner part so that the entire origami moves in a circle. [Tom] then extended the left mouse button to a switch, which he affixed to the outside.

This controller re-uses a slightly modified mouse that [Tom] used in a previous Bust-A-Move controller. He is using a FreePIE script and vJoy in order to map mouse movements to the joystick inputs expected by the game. Watch [Tom] bust some moves after the break.

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Bust A Move Doesn’t Have To Be Such A Grind

December 15, 2018 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

PC gamers have the benefit of the mouse and keyboard, which are highly flexible when it comes to input devices for gaming. What’s more, the freedom of the platform means that it’s easy to whip up whatever mad controller you can dream of to best suit the games you’re playing. Enter [Tom Tilley] with the aptly-named Hipster Game Controller.

Yes, this is a controller made out of a coffee grinder. The hand-crank setup makes it perfect for imitating the game board in that puzzle classic, Bust-A-Move. [Tom] interfaces the controller in a perfectly hacky way – the scroll wheel from a mouse is removed from the case and zip tied to the shaft of the grinder, allowing the rotation of the grinder to turn the wheel. The mouse wheel is then mapped as the aim control in the game – it really is that simple. An arcade button is also fitted into a mug and wired into the left mouse button to act as the trigger.

[Tom] notes that while you can fill the grinder up while you play, it makes playing the game very hard work. It’s a hacky build to show that sometimes, you don’t need a microcontroller and lines of code – just a mouse, some wire, and a healthy dose of ingenuity.

And, as it turns out, [Tom]’s been quite the Bust-a-Move fan for a few years now. Video after the break.

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Bust-a-Move Physical Controller

November 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This set of PVC cranks make you work for your game of Puzzle Bobble, also known as Bust-a-Move. It uses a little cannon centered at the bottom of the screen to pop bubbles based on like colors. There is a cartoon character that cranks as hard as it can to aim that cannon, and this hack brings that effort into the real world.

The controllers are made from PVC. A bit of creative use of joints and different pipe diameters make for a freely rotating rig. Rotation is monitored via the optical encoder wheel from an old mouse. Above you can also see the plastic container that hosts the ‘fire’ button. Since the mouse is already an input device, there’s no other electronic work to be done. Just plug the controllers in and map the wheel/buttons to the game you want to play. Make sure to check out the demo video embedded after the break.

If Angry Birds is more of what you’re playing these days you should consider building your own slingshot controller.

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