Home Automation Terminal Has Great Post-Apocalyptic Look

May 21, 2024 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

If you use home automation these days, you’re probably used to using smart speakers, your smartphone, or those tabletop touchscreen devices. If you wanted something cooler and more personal, you could try building something like [Rick] did.

A Raspberry Pi 400 is the basis for the machine, and it still uses the original keyboard. It’s paired with a 3D-printed shell with a 7″ Waveshare HDMI touch display in it. The LCD is placed behind a Fresnel lens which provides some magnification. It displays a glowing blue command line which accepts text commands. It’s hooked up to the OpenAI API, so it’s a little smarter than just any old regular terminal. It’s hooked up to [Rick’s] home automation system, so he can use natural language queries to control lighting, music, and all the rest. Think Alexa or Siri, but in text form.

The design of the case, with its rounded edges, vents, and thick bezels gives it a strong retro-futuristic look, reminiscent of something out of Fallout. [Rick’s] neat application of weathering techniques helped a lot, too.

It reminds us of some of the cooler Pip Boy builds we’ve seen. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own creative terminal build in the works, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: A Wrist-Worn Deck With A Hybrid Interface

October 16, 2022 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

You’d think that now that the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest is wrapped up, we’d stop writing about it. Sorry, but no — there were so many great entries that we just can’t help but keep focusing on them. And this wearable hybrid interface cyberdeck has a look we love so much that we can’t resist spotlighting it.

We wouldn’t go so far as to call the “hgDeck” a PipBoy, but [Igor Brkić]’s wrist-worn deck certainly bears some similarity with to the Fallout-famous terminal. In fact, the design for this one is based on his earlier hgTerm Raspberry Pi mini-laptop, which honestly would have made a great entry all by itself. But while the two version shares some similarities, the hgDeck puts a serious twist on the form factor. In the stowed configuration, the Pi Zero W puts the main display, a 3.5″ Waveshare TFT, to work using the resistive touchscreen interface. But with the flick of a finger, a motor flips the monitor up on a set of pantograph linkages, which exposes a compact Bluetooth keyboard. Another touch stows the screen and returns you to touchscreen-only operation.

There were a fair number of wrist-worn decks in the contest’s final results, and while this one didn’t win, [Igor]’s build has got to be one of the cooler designs we’ve seen, one that almost seems practical in the real world.

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Pip Boys As A Service

November 24, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

A few weeks ago Fallout 4 was released, and like all future games of the year, productivity has fallen through the floor, cosplayers are busy crafting outfits, and modders are busy tearing the game to pieces. As with all big game releases, Fallout 4 has a super-deluxe, ultra-collectible edition, and this version comes with its own Pip Boy, the in-game wrist-mounted user interface that manages stats, inventory, and quests.

This Pip Boy is actually functional, relying on a smartphone to mirror the display in-game Pip Boy. This, of course, means there must be some sort of communication between the game and a phone. [Kyle] found this somewhat interesting and decided to dig into these communications to see what else could be done with the real life mirror of the in-game Pip Boy

With a simple swipe of nmap, [Kyle] discovered two ports open on his PS4. By creating a relay to listen in on whatever is passing through these ports, [Kyle] built a tool that allows anyone to dump data from the in-game Pip Boy to any other service.

The library and command line tool work with PS4 and PC and are able to dump stats and data from the in-game Pip Boy to the outside world. It will be interesting to see what kind of mashups could be created with this; especially interesting would be a leaderboard for an entire office of vault dwellers, but a TV-sized Pip Boy would also suffice.

Yes, that is a challenge.

The Most Drool-Worthy Pip-Boy To Date Can Be Yours

November 16, 2015 by Cameron Coward 33 Comments

Pip-Boy props are nothing new in the maker world, especially since the availability and prices of 3D printers have made the undertaking more straightforward. Something about bringing a piece of the Fallout universe into the real world is just incredibly appealing – so much so that Fallout 4 collector’s editions included a Pip-Boy phone case. However, because of practical limitations these props are usually just plastic shells that house a cell phone. [zapwizard] wasn’t satisfied with a purely aesthetic prop, so he has decided to design his own Pip-Boy 3000 Mk4 from scratch, while retaining as much of the functionality as possible.

For the few of you who are unfamiliar, the Pip-Boy is a wrist-mounted computer from the Fallout series of games. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s used to manage your character’s inventory, stats, quest data, and so on. Because of how often you interact with the Pip-Boy throughout the game, it has become very near and dear to the hearts of Fallout fans, which has driven it’s popularity for prop-making.

It’s no wonder, then, that we’ve featured a number of builds here on Hackaday in the past. All of these builds have been impressive, but [zapwizard] is taking it to a whole other level. As a product engineer, he certainly has the experience necessary to bring this to life, and he’s not skipping any details. He’s starting by modeling everything up in CAD, using Solid Edge. Every knob, button, dial, and latch has been reproduced in meticulous detail, and will be functional with completely custom electronics. [zipwizard] is still in the design phase, but he should be close to getting started on the actual build. He’s also considering offering a limited run of units for sale, so be sure to get in touch with him if that tickles your fancy!

[thanks Daniel Kennedy]

Dealing With Fallout

November 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

In just a few short days, Fallout 4 will be released and a substantial portion of the Hackaday staff will be taking the day off. As you would expect, a lot of people with 3D printers, soldering irons, and far too much time on their hands are getting pumped for the Fallout release. Here’s a few Fallout builds we’ve found over the past few weeks:

Pip-Boys

The most iconic thing you’ll find in a Fallout game is the Pip-Boy, the UI for the player and a neat wrist-mounted computer (that somehow has a CRT in it, I guess) for the player’s character. Hackaday’s own [Will Sweatman] built his own Pip-Boy 3000 that’s completely functional. The build uses a 4.3 inch touch display, a 10 position rotary switch, and a bunch of 3D printed parts.

Elsewhere on Hackaday.io, [Karl] is working on a functional Pip-Boy controller for Fallout, and [cody] built one with a Raspberry Pi. Of course, if you’re super special and have two thousand dollars to blow, Bethesda released a limited-edition Pip-Boy edition of Fallout 4 that’s compatible with most cell phones.

The Not Pip-Boys

There’s more to Fallout than just wrist-mounted computers, and for the true aficionados, there are gigantic gear-shaped doors. [TreyHill] has a partially finished basement with a gaming room tucked behind his very own vault door. The door itself is built out of plywood and rolls along a gear rack mounted to the floor. Will it hold up to a nuclear blast? Probably not. Is it up to code? It looks cool, at least.

[Lilykill] on Thingiverse is extremely capable with a copy of solidworks and produced a bunch of 3D models from the Fallout universe that includes power armor, ray guns, more Pip-Boys, plasma grenades, and a Nuka-Cola truck.

Fallout 4 for the Apple II

Fallout 4 will be available for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, leaving out a large contingent of retro gamers. Fear not, lovers of the 6502: there’s’ a version for the Apple II:

This tribute to both the Apple II and Fallout was made with the Outlaw Editor, an SDK for pseudo-3D game development on exceedingly old hardware. There’s actual ray casting happening in this tribute, and it works just the same as Wolfenstein 3D or the like.

Is Your Wearable Tech Too Subtle?

July 19, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

wrist

With any con, you’re going to have people walking around with things they’ve built. It’s the perfect venue for wearable tech, and the cream of the crop for HOPE X is [Zack]’s SmarTwatCh. Billed as a 3D printed big ass smart watch, it’s anything but subtle and has enough gadgets and gizmos to make even the biggest tech aficionado blush

The front of the SmarTwatCh is an authentic 2×20 glass encapsulated VFD running at 160 Volts, chosen for its danger and character. Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Teensy 3.0, pots, knobs, and switches, a laser, LEDs, and an alcohol sensor because, “the future is quantified drinking”.

‘Apps’ for this smart watch include a TV-B-Gone, laser pointer, breathalyzer, flashlight, and just about anything else [Zack] can think of that would involve a Bluetooth adapter and a text display. Video of [Zack] demoing the watch at HOPE below.

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We’re this Close To A Real Pip-Boy

October 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

Whether inspired by the vaults of Fallout or the mysterious wrist device worn by [Turanga Leela], we’re just glad to see someone finally made a wrist-worn cellphone,

The Ultimate Wrist Watch, as the creator [Rob] calls it, is based on his Motorola Defy smart phone, tucked inside a neatly modified iPod wrist band meant to hold a runner’s music player. Simply mounting a cellphone to a wrist would be a bit awkward and a huge drain on battery life, so [Rob] wrote an app to automatically turn on the display when the accelerometer detects the phone is in the correct watch-reading position, and turns it off when [Rob] lowers his arm once again.

Right now the Ultimate Wrist Watch only stands in for the functions of a standard wrist watch – time, date, a chronometer and stopwatch are just about the only features implemented so far. Still, this is dangerously close to the wrist-mounted computers we’ve been promised for so long.

You can grab the source for the Ultimate Wrist Watch on [Rob]’s git, or just download it off Google Play. Check out the video of the Ultimate Wrist Watch after the break.

Continue reading “We’re *this* Close To A Real Pip-Boy” →