OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator Teardown

September 18, 2008 by Ian 16 Comments

m8ta fun did an extensive teardown of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA). OCZ’s computer/mind interface is actually a fairly straight forward design. An analog front-end cleans and amplifies the ‘neural’ signal with a few op-amps before feeding it to a 24 bit analog to digital converter (ADC). A USB enabled PIC microcontroller reads the 24bit parallel ADC output through a common 7400 series parallel to serial adapter IC. The device has an ICSP programing header (top right), though it’s not yet clear if the PIC can be read or written.

[Thanks, joeyo]

USB NES Controller Plus

July 19, 2008 by Will O'Brien 6 Comments

USB NES controllers are old school these days, but [Jay] put together a nice new take on the project. He shoehorned a USB interface adapter, USB hub and a USB memory stick to store his collection of NES roms and emulators right on the controller. He even dug up a black USB cable to keep the original look of the controller. Now he can just plug in and load his game selection directly from the controller.

Cheap ARM Color LCD Platform

July 18, 2008 by Will O'Brien 6 Comments

Today, [sprite_tm] let us in on one of his pet projects. This is an inexpensive portable game platform runs about $50 and happens to use an ARM CPU and a 320×240 color LCD. Because it’s so cheap, he’s been working on reverse engineering the thing and there’s already a proof of concept homebrew version of Pong out for it.
Update: Yeah, yeah – title’s fixed.

XBox Controller USB Labotomy

July 17, 2008 by Will O'Brien 10 Comments

[sprite_tm]’s back with one of his excellent Atmel projects. This time he decided to turn an original XBox controller (cause he likes ’em) into a standard USB HID device. He gutted the custom USB chip that Microsoft installed and replaced it with an Atmel ATMega88. The ATMega required a few changes to the board, but nothing too off the wall.

DIY Joystick Glove

July 14, 2008 by Will O'Brien No comments

[Elf] sent in this interesting DIY joystick glove. There aren’t many details on the actual glove switch design, but from the schematic on the site, it seems to mostly consist of micro-switches with some pot adjusted transistors to calibrate the X-Y signals.

Universal Joystick USB Interface

June 14, 2008 by Will O'Brien 5 Comments

Building on his USB NES pad interface, [Raphaël] released a universal USB joystick interface. It presents a HID device with four directional buttons and eight general purpose buttons. The board uses an ATmega8 and implements USB entirely in software.

UPCB Makes Your Arcade Stick Universal

June 13, 2008 by Juan Aguilar No comments

The Universal PCB project lets you make any controller (specifically arcade sticks) console agnostic. A PIC microcontroller is used to translate between the button presses and the signals for the specific console you’re connected to. It uses a DB15 for the external plug. The PIC knows which console you’re plugged into based on which pins are high or low in your console specific adapter cable. The board includes a piggyback plug so you can plug in an Xbox360 controller board (like the one above) since the console requires authentication. The PIC’s firmware is conveniently upgradeable over the USB cable.