controller

269 Articles

Stylish Business Card With A Stylophone Built In

May 11, 2018 by 19 Comments

If you’re in the electronics business, PCB business cards seem like a natural fit. They may be impractical and expensive, but they can really set you apart from that boring paper card from Vistaprint crowd. But they need to make sense for what you do, so for a musician and MIDI pro, this MIDI-controller stylophone business card is a real eye- and ear-catcher.

This business card is an idea that [Mitxela] has been kicking around for a while, and he even built a prototype a couple of years ago. The homebrew card, made using the spray paint, laser etching, and ferric chloride method, worked well enough as a proof of concept, but it was a little rough around the edges and needed the professional touch of a PCB fabricator. We’ve got to say that the finished cards are pretty darn sexy, with the black resist contrasting nicely against the gold-immersion pads. He selected a 1-mm thick board and made the USB connector as a separate small board; snapped off of the main board and reflowed back on, it builds up the edge connector to the proper thickness. The parts count is low — just an ATtiny85 and a resistor ladder to encode each key, with a simple jumper used as the stylus. The device itself is just a MIDI controller and makes no music on its own, but we still think this is a pretty creative way to hang out a shingle.

[Mitxela] has quite a few interesting builds, and is no stranger to our pages. Check out his recent servo-plucked MIDI music box, or these amazing miniature LED earrings.

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High-Effort Streaming Remote For Low-Effort Bingeing

March 10, 2018 by 7 Comments

There’s no limit to the amount of work some people will put into avoiding work. For instance, why bother to get up from your YouTube-induced vegetative state to adjust the volume when you can design and build a remote to do it for you?

Loath to interrupt his PC streaming binge sessions, [miroslavus] decided to take matters into his own hands. When a commercially available wireless keyboard proved simultaneously overkill for the job and comically non-ergonomic, he decided to build a custom streaming remote. His recent microswitch encoder is prominently featured and provides scrolling control for volume and menu functions, and dedicated buttons are provided for play controls. The device reconfigures at the click of a switch to support Netflix, which like YouTube is controlled by sending keystrokes to the PC through a matching receiver. It’s a really thoughtful design, and we’re sure the effort [miroslavus] put into this will be well worth the dozens of calories it’ll save in the coming years.

A 3D-printed DIY remote is neat, but don’t forget that printing can also save a dog-chewed remote and win the Repairs You Can Print contest.

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Cross-Brand Adapter Makes For Blended Battery Family

February 20, 2018 by 26 Comments

Even though he’s a faithful DeWalt cordless tool guy, [Richard Day] admits to a wandering eye in the tool aisle, looking at the Ryobi offerings with impure thoughts. Could he stay true to his brand and stick with his huge stock of yellow tools and batteries, or would he succumb to temptation and add another set of batteries and chargers so he could have access to a few specialty lime green tools?

Luckily, we live in the future, so there’s a third way — building a cross-brand battery adapter that lets him power Ryobi tools with his DeWalt batteries. [Richard]’s solution is a pure hack, as in physically hacking battery packs and forcing them to work and play well together. Mechanically, this was pretty easy — a dead Ryobi pack from the recycling bin at Home Depot was stripped down for its case, which was glued to a Dewalt 20-v to 18-v battery adapter. The tricky part came from dealing with the battery control electronics. Luckily, the donor DeWalt line has that circuitry in the adapter, while Ryobi puts it in the battery. That meant simply transplanting the PCB from the adapter to the Ryobi battery shell would be enough. The video below shows the process and the results — Ryobi tools happily clicking away on DeWalt batteries.

While [Richard] took a somewhat brute-force approach here, we imagine 3D-printed parts might make for a more elegant solution and offer other brand permutations. After all, printing an adapter should be easier than whipping up a cordless battery pack de novo.

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What Is This, A Controller For Ants?!

January 31, 2018 by 6 Comments

What’s the smallest controller you’ve ever used? [BitBuilt] forum user [Madmorda] picked up a cool little GameCube controller keychain with semi-working buttons at her local GameStop. As makers are wont to do, she figured she could turn it into a working controller and — well — the rest is history.

This miniaturized controller’s original buttons were essentially one piece of plastic and all the buttons would depress at once — same goes for the D-pad. Likewise, the original joystick and C-stick lacked springs and wouldn’t return to a neutral position after fidgeting with them. To get the ball rolling, [Madmorda] picked up a GC+ board — a custom GameCube controller board — just small enough to fit this project, eleven hard tact switches for the various buttons, and two squishy tact switches to replicate the original controller’s L and R button semi-analog, semi-digital functionality.

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Building A Better Kerbal Space Program Controller

January 23, 2018 by 25 Comments

If you have even the most passing interest in space and what it takes to get there, you’ve probably already played Kerbal Space Program (KSP). If you haven’t, then you should set aside about ten hours today to go check that out real quick. Don’t worry, Hackaday will still be here when you get back. Right now you need to focus on getting those rockets built and establishing a network of communication satellites so you can get out of low orbit.

For those of you who’ve played the game (or are joining us again after playing KSP for the prescribed 10, 12, 16 hours), you’ll know that the humble computer keyboard is not very well suited to jaunts through space. You really want a joystick and throttle at the absolute minimum for accurate maneuvers, but even you’ll be spending plenty of time back on the keyboard to operate the craft’s various systems. If you want the ultimate KSP control setup, you’ll need to follow in the footsteps of [Hugo Peeters] and build your own. Luckily for us, he’s written up an exceptionally well detailed guide on building KSP controllers that should prove useful even if you don’t want to clone his.

Wiring switches and buttons to the Arduino.

At the most basic level, building a KSP controller consists of hooking a bunch of switches and buttons to a microcontroller such as the Arduino or Teensy, and converting those to USB HID key presses that the game understands. This works fine up to a point, but is limited because it’s only a one-way method of communication. For his controller, [Hugo] forked KSPSerialIO, a plugin for KSP that allows bidirectional communication between the game and your controller, enabling things like digital readouts of speed and fuel levels on the controller’s panel.

Once the logistics of how you’ll talk to the game are settled, the rest is really up to the individual. The first step in building your own KSP controller is deciding what you want it to do. Are you looking to fly planes? Control a rover? Maybe you just want a master control panel for your space station. There’s a whole lot of things you can build in KSP, and the layout, inputs, and displays on your controller should ideally reflect your play style.

[Hugo] went with a fairly general purpose panel, but did spend quite a bit of extra time to get some slick LED bar graphs hooked up to display resource levels of different systems on his craft. That’s an extra step that isn’t strictly required for a build like this, but once you see it, you’re going to have a hard time not wanting to include it on your own panel. He also went through the expense of having the panel and case professionally laser cut and etched, which definitely gives it a polished feel.

We’ve covered quite a number of custom KSP controllers here at Hackaday. The overlap between KSP players and hackers seems unusually high, but of course a game that lets you build and fly contraptions of your own design does sound like something that would be right up our alley.

Rescue An Old Washing Machine With Modern Controls

January 2, 2018 by 25 Comments

The humble washing machine is an appliance that few of us are truly passionate about. They’re expected to come into our lives and serve faithfully, with a minimum of fuss. In the good old days, it was common for a washing machine to last for well over 20 years, and in doing so ingratiate itself with its masters. Sadly now while the simple mechanical parts may still be serviceable, the electronics behind the scenes can tend to fail. This is a Russian story (Google Translate link) about giving a new brain to an old friend.

The machine in question is known as an Oriole, and had served long and hard. Logic chips and entire controllers had been replaced, but were continuing to fail. Instead, a replacement was designed to keep the machine operational for some time yet. Rather than relying on recreating the full feature set of the machine it was decided to eliminate certain things for simplicity. Settings for different fabric types or wash modes were eliminated, which is an easy choice if like most people all your washes are done in the same mode anyway. A water level sensor was found to be no longer functioning properly and was simpler to eliminate than repair.

The brain is a PIC microcontroller, with an ESP12 acting as a webserver for monitoring and control. Additionally, a glass lens was taken from some former medical equipment and neatly installed in the control panel of the machine before an OLED display, giving the machine far more feedback than before. Control is still done with the machine’s original buttons. Temperature sensors were added as well to allow the machine to shut itself down in the event of an overheating problem. It’s all tied together on what looks to be a classic single-sided homebrew PCB.

It’s a great project that shows it’s easy to bring modern electronic might to bear on vintage mechanical hardware, with great results. A washing machine lives to see another day, another load – and the landfill remains just that much lighter, to boot.

We’ve seen controller builds for old washing machines before, too – like replacing mechanical control with an Arduino.

[Thanks to Tirotron for sending this in!]

Turn A Car Into A Game Controller

December 22, 2017 by 20 Comments

The CAN bus has become a staple of automotive engineering since it was introduced in the late ’80s, but in parallel with the spread of electronic devices almost every single piece of equipment inside a car has been put on the CAN bus. While there are opinions on whether or not this is a good thing, the reality is that enough data is gathered on this bus to turn an unmodified modern car into a video game controller with just a little bit of code.

The core of [Scott]’s project is a laptop and a Python program that scrapes information about the car from the car’s CAN bus, including positions of the pedals and the steering wheel. This information can be accessed by plugging an adapter into the OBD-II port (a standard for all cars made after 1995). From there, the laptop parses the CAN data into keyboard and mouse commands for your video game of choice.

This is an interesting investigation into the nitty-gritty of the CAN bus, but also a less dangerous demonstration of all of the data available from the car than some other cases we’ve seen. At least [Scott]’s Mazda (presumably) lacks any wireless attack vectors!

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