White pieces on a teal and white chess board. The line of pawns shows three segmented queens in the foreground, one piece being pressed by a man's hand from above in a state between queen and pawn, and the remainder of the pawns in the background in the pawn state.

Transforming Pawn Changes The Game

November 2, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 14 Comments

3D printing has allowed the hobbyist to turn out all sorts of interesting chess sets with either intricate details or things that are too specialized to warrant a full scale injection molded production run. Now, the magic of 3D printing has allowed [Works By Design] to change the game by making pawns that can automatically transform themselves into queens.

Inspired by a CGI transforming chess piece designed by [Polyfjord], [Works By Design] wanted to make a pawn that could transform itself exist in the real world. What started as a chonky setup with multiple springs and a manually-actuated mechanism eventually was whittled down to a single spring, some pins, and four magnets as vitamins for the 3D printed piece.

We always love getting a peek into the trial-and-error process of a project, especially for something with such a slick-looking final product. Paired with a special chess board with steel in the ends, the magnets in the base activate the transformation sequence when they reach the opposite end.

After you print your own, how about playing chess against the printer? We’d love to see a version machined from metal too.

Thanks to [DjBiohazard] on Discord for the tip!

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Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024

October 27, 2024 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding “Yes!” The discovery involves the Smackover Formation — and we’ll be honest here that half the reason we chose to feature this story was to be able to write “Smackover Formation” — which is a limestone aquifer covering a vast arc from the Rio Grande River in Texas through to the western tip of the Florida panhandle. Parts of the aquifer, including the bit that bulges up into southern Arkansas, bear a brine rich in lithium salts, far more so than any of the brines currently commercially exploited for lithium metal production elsewhere in the world. Given the measured concentration and estimated volume of brine in the formation, there could be between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium in the formation; even at the lower end of the range, that’s enough to build nine times the number of EV batteries needed.

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Lunar Lander Game Asks You To Write A Simple Autopilot

August 16, 2024 by Donald Papp 28 Comments

Everyone likes a good lunar landing simulator, and [Dominic Doty] wrote a fun take on the idea: your goal is to write an autopilot controller to manage the landing. Try it out!

Virtual landers are far cheaper than real ones, thank goodness.

[Dominic] was inspired in part by this simple rocket landing game which is very much an exercise in reflex and intuition, not to mention being much faster-paced than the classic 1979 video game (which you can also play in your browser here.)

[Dominic]’s version has a similar classic look to the original, but embraces a more thoughtful approach. In it, one uses plain JavaScript to try to minimize the lander’s angle, velocity, and angular velocity in order to land safely on the generated terrain.

Want to see if you have the right stuff? Here’s a direct link to Lunar Pilot. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t succeed right away, though. Moon landings have had plenty of failures, and are actually very hard.

Turning Horrible Browser Controls Into A Game

July 15, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

With all of the various keyboards, mouses (mice?), and other human interface devices (HID) available for our computers, there’s no possible way for developers to anticipate every type of input for every piece of software they build. Most of the time everything will work fine as long as some basic standards are kept, both from the hardware and software sides, but that’s not always the case. [Losso] noticed a truly terrible volume control method when visiting certain websites while also using a USB volume knob, and used this quirk to build a Breakout game with it.

It turns out his volume control knob would interact simultaneously with certain video players’ built-in volume control and the system volume for the operating system, leading to a number of undesirable conditions. However, the fact that this control is built in to certain browsers in the first place led to this being the foundation for the Breakout clone [Losso] is calling KNOB-OUT. Unlike volume buttons on something like a multimedia keyboard, the USB volume control knob can be configured much more easily to account for acceleration, making it more faithful to the original arcade version of the game. The game itself is coded in JavaScript with the source code available right in the browser.

If you’d like to play [Losso]’s game here’s a direct link to it although sometimes small web-based projects like these tend to experience some slowdown when they first get posted here. And, if you’re looking for some other games to play in a browser like it’s the mid-00s again, we’re fans of this project which brings the unofficial Zelda game Zelda Classic to our screens.

Portable, Full-Size Arcade Cabinets

June 27, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

Believe it or not, there was a time when the only way for many of us to play video games was to grab a roll of quarters and head to the mall. Even though there’s a working computer or video game console in essentially every house now doesn’t mean we don’t look back with a certain nostalgia on those times, though. Some have turned to restoring vintage arcade cabinets and others build their own. This hackerspace got a unique request for a full-sized arcade cabinet that was also easily portable as well.

The original request was for a portable arcade cabinet, and the original designs were for a laptop-like tabletop arcade. But further back-and-forth made it clear they wanted full-size cabinets that just happened to also be portable. So with that criteria in mind the group started building the units. The updated design is modular, allowing the controls, monitor, and Raspberry Pi running the machines to be in self-contained units, with the cabinets in two parts that can quickly be assembled on-site. The base is separate and optional, with the top section capable of being assembled on the base or on something like a tabletop or bar, and the electronics section quickly drops in.

While the idea of a Pi-powered arcade cabinet is certainly nothing new, the quick build, prototyping, design, and final product that’s mobile and quickly assembled are all worth checking out. There is even more information on the build at the project’s GitHub page including Fusion 360 models. If you need your cabinets to be even more portable, this tabletop MAME cabinet is a great place to start.

RepTrap Keeps Watch Over Our Cold-Blooded Friends

May 7, 2024 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Wait a second, read that title again. This isn’t a throwback 3D printing project at all. That’s “RepTrap” as in reptile trap, and it’s a pretty clever way to study our cold-blooded friends in their natural habitat.

Now, game cameras — or trail cameras, if you’re less interested in eating what you see — are pretty much reduced to practice. For not that much money you can pick up one of these battery-powered devices, strap it to a tree, and have it automatically snap high-quality pictures of whatever wildlife happens to wander past. But nearly all of the commercially available game cameras have pyroelectric infrared sensors, which trigger on the temperature difference between a warm-blooded animal and the ambient temperature of the background. But what to do when you’re more interested in cold-blooded critters?

Enter [Mirko], who stumbled upon this problem while working with a conservation group in Peru. The group wanted to study snakes, insects, and other ectothermic animals, which are traditionally studied by trapping with pitfalls and other invasive techniques. Unable to rely on PIR, [Mirko] rigged up what amounts to a battery-powered light curtain using a VL53L4CD laser time-of-flight sensor. Mounted above the likely path of an animal, the sensor monitors the height of everything in its field of view. When an animal comes along, cold-blooded or otherwise, RepTrap triggers a remote camera and snaps a picture. Based on the brief video below, it’s pretty sensitive, too.

[Mirko] started out this project using an RP2040 but switched to an ESP32 to take advantage of Bluetooth camera triggering. The need for weatherproofing was also a big driver for the build; [Mirko] is shooting for an IP68 rating, which led to his interesting use of a Hall sensor and external magnet as a power switch.

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Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git

April 12, 2024 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

What better way to learn to use Git than a gamified interface that visualizes every change? That’s the idea behind Oh My Git! which aims to teach players all about the popular version control system that underpins so many modern software projects.

Git good, with a gameified git interface.

Sometimes the downside to a tool being so ubiquitous is that it tends to be taken for granted that everyone already knows how to use it, and those starting entirely from scratch can be left unsure where to begin. That’s what creators [bleeptrack] and [blinry] had in mind with Oh My Git! which is freely available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The idea is to use a fun playing-card interface to not only teach players the different features, but also to build intuitive familiarity for operations like merging and rebasing by visualizing in real-time the changes a player’s actions make.

The game is made with beginners in mind, with the first two (short) levels establishing that managing multiple versions of a file can quickly become unwieldy without help. Enter git — which the game explains is essentially a time machine — and it’s off to the races.

It might be aimed at beginners, but more advanced users can learn a helpful trick or two. The game isn’t some weird pseudo-git simulator, either. The back end uses real git repositories, with a real shell and git interface behind it all. Prefer to type commands in directly instead of using the playing card interface? Go right ahead!

Oh My Git! uses the free and open-source Godot game engine (not to be confused with the Godot machine, a chaos-based random number generator.)