USB Dongle For Unmodified NES Controllers

July 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

This USB dongle will let you use your unmodified NES controllers on a computer. That’s because it includes the same socket you’d find on the classic console.

The image above shows the prototype. Instead of etching the copper clad board, each trace was milled by hand (presumably with a rotary tool). To the left the black square is made of several layers of electrical tape that builds the substrate up enough to fit snugly in a USB port.

An ATtiny45 running the V-USB stack has no problem reading the controller data and formatting it for use as a USB device. This is actually the second iteration of the project. The first attempt used an ATtiny44 and a free-formed circuit housed inside the controller. It worked quite well, but required alterations to the circuit board, and you needed to replace the stock connector with a USB plug. This dongle allows the controller to go unaltered so it can be used with an NES console again in the future.

Playing Footsie With Your Video Games

July 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Jon] will be tapping away with his toes during gaming session thanks to this foot controller which is packed with buttons and sensors. It’s the second iteration of the build. The original had some solder joints break and the USB stopped working. He had also been experiencing some erratic behavior and so he decided to upgrade the control hardware and add a few more things in the process.

This version uses an Arduino Uno as the interface board. He did a bunch of prototyping to find the best way to hook up all the analog sensors, and how to properly debounce the buttons. Once he was happy with the inputs he set about finding a better way to use the USB HID standard with the device. We were surprised to hear that the ATmega16u2 (one of the new AVR chips which includes USB hardware) doesn’t play nicely with Linux. But [Jon] managed to hack his way around that issue and now he’s gaming with an even better foot controller than before.

Custom Starcraft Controller

July 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

This Starcraft controller was designed as a contest entry. The goal of the contest was to provide a custom controller for the Starcraft Real-Time-Strategy game that shared some of the features seen in First Person Shooter controllers.

The design started as rough sketches. From the there button layout was prototyped before actually building a virtual model of the entire controller. A rendering of the model was submitted as a contest entry, and we’re glad it was also seen through to a physical device. This involved sending the design files off for 3D printing. What came back was painted and assembled to achieve the beautiful look seen above.

On the right is a stick that acts as the mouse controller. The buttons on the left are just the most necessary of Starcraft control keys. They all map to the appropriate keyboard keys and the device enumerates as an HID keyboard so no button mapping is necessary. That being said, a player does have the option of remapping if the layout doesn’t suit.

[Via Reddit with more info at Shoryuken]

Interfacing SNES Controllers With Your Raspberry Pi

July 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This lovely set of wires lets [Florian] connect stock Super Nintendo controllers to his Raspberry Pi. The IDC connector in the upper left plugs into the GPIO header on the RPi rather than going the route of using an intermediary USB converter.

The setup lets you connect two controllers at once, so you’ll have no trouble going head-to-head on Mario Kart as seen in the clip after the break. The ports themselves were pulled from a pair of SNES extension cables. Since button signals are pushed to the console via a shift register there’s just five wires needed for each (voltage, ground, data, clock, and latch). As far was we know the Raspberry Pi pins are not 5V tolerant so you probably want to add some level conversion to this circuit if you build it yourself.

[Florian] wrote a C program which shifts in data from the controllers and converts it to HID keyboard inputs. This should make it extremely flexible when it comes to emulator setup, and using the technique for different styles of controllers should also be pretty easy.

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Multi-system Nintendo Emulator Uses Stock Controllers

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

The first month of [WoolyDawg5’s] summer break went into building one Nintendo emulator to rule them all. He thinks there’s nothing like playing the games on the original controllers, and we agree with him 100%. Here you can see that the cartridge door on this NES enclosure hides the extra connectors he needs.

With that door closed this looks like a stock console, but only from the front. If you take a look at the back of it you’ll see how he pulled this off. There’s a Zotac motherboard whose I/O panel has been fitted into the back. It’s responsible for emulating games for the NES, SNES, and GameCube consoles — we’re sure it can do more but that covers the controller ports seen here. Each port is wired to a USB controller module. The cables for these modules exit the back of the case and plug into the motherboard’s I/O panel. There is WiFi for the board, and that’s what [WoolyDawg] uses for configuration, tunneling into the OS instead of connecting a keyboard or mouse.

Of course you could just shoehorn all-original console hardware into one package to accomplish something like this.

[Thanks KoldFuzion]

Android CNC Controller

June 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Matt] is the proud owner of a JGRO-based CNC router and he’s been working on a way to control it without a computer. What he came up with is a way to drive the CNC machine using this Android tablet.

A big part of the hack is the CNC controller that he’s using. The TinyG is a board that can take commands via USB and convert them to instructions for up to six axes. In the video after the break [Matt] shows off a direct USB connection as the control method. This is the most interesting part to us, but the system can also be run through the network with the assistance of a computer feeding commands to the TinyG. This second method means the Android controller would be wireless.

A trio of repositories host the code [Matt] is using. From the demo it looks like the Android app has no shortage of features.

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Large-scale Arduino Controlled Greenhouse Does Some Serious Farming

June 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Instrument Tek] isn’t messing around with a hobby-sized greenhouse. In fact if it were any bigger we’d call it a commercial operation. But what interests us is the professional-quality greenhouse automation he built around and Arduino board.

The greenhouse is about what you’d expect to see at a nursery, except the footprint is somewhere around 10’x10′. It’s a stick-built frame with walls made of poly. Professional greenhouses monitor and regulate temperature and humidity and this one does just that. The video after the break starts off by showing the controller box. It has temperature, humidity, and light sensors that allow the Arduino to judge growing conditions. If it gets too hot, some slats are opened and a fan exhausts air from the structure. If it gets to cold, a series of light fixtures are energized. They contain heat lamps, as this setup is in northern Alberta, Canada and it can get quite cold some nights. The drip system is also automated, with a solenoid to turn water on and off.

In addition to that 3:26 show-and-tell, we’ve embedded a 27-minute video that shows how to build the controller box. So you can start you plants indoors on the rack, then populate the greenhouse when they get large enough.

Continue reading “Large-scale Arduino Controlled Greenhouse Does Some Serious Farming” →