Portable PS2 With A Side Of Pi

September 6, 2019 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Home games consoles have occupied a special space in the marketplace over the last 3 decades. The crowning jewels of their respective companies, they inspired legions of diehard fans and bitter enmities against followers of alternative hardware. For some, a mere handheld is a watered down experience that simply won’t do. Nay, the console itself must become portable!

It’s this line of thinking that may have inspired [Darkwing Mod] to produce this elegant portable PlayStation 2. Started at the end of 2013, it’s the product of six years of on-and-off work, a situation familiar to many a hacker. It packs an original PS2 motherboard inside a slick black-and-blue case, expertly crafted with plastic and putty for a smooth finish. A Raspberry Pi 2 also lives inside, serving up games over a Samba share. This method was chosen for its short load times and robustness for the portable form factor, versus trying to squeeze a full DVD drive inside. It’s used in combination with Free MCBoot to load the games.

The worklog is extensive, detailing the long road to completion. It’s clear that this was a labor of love, and we hope it sees many hours of use now that it’s up and running. It’s not the first portable PS2 we’ve seen, and it likely won’t be the last. Video after the break.

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Turning A Car Into A Computer Mouse

February 18, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 20 Comments

[William Osman] and [Simone Giertz] have graced our pages before, both with weird, wacky and wonderful hacks so it’s no surprise that when they got together they did so to turn Simone’s car into a computer mouse. It’s trickier than you might think.

They started by replacing the lens of an optical mouse with a lens normally used for a security camera. Surprisingly, when mounted to the car’s front bumper it worked! But it wasn’t ideal. The problem lies in that to move a mouse cursor sideways you have to move the mouse sideways. However, cars don’t move sideways, they turn by going in an arc. Move your mouse in an arc right now without giving it any sideways motion and see what happens. The mouse cursor on the screen moves vertically up or down the screen, but not left or right. So how to tell if the car is turning? For that, they added a magnetometer. The mouse then gives the distance the car moved and the magnetometer gives the heading, or angle. With some simple trigonometry, they calculate the car’s coordinates.

The mouse click is done using the car’s horn, but details are vague there.

And yes, using the carmouse is as fun as it sounds, though we still don’t recommend texting while driving using this technique. Watch them in the videos below as they write an email and drive a self-portrait of the car.

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Portable PS2, Courtesy Of Cross Plane

October 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

It’s not exactly a portable, but [Downing]’s PS2 advance puts all the power of a Playstation 2 in the palm of your hands, all while being more popular that the Vita.

For the audio and video, the project uses a Cross Plane, a project from a slightly unsuccessful Kickstarter [Downing] pulled the plug on last month. When the handheld is plugged in to the Cross Plane, all the audio, video, and controller wires are transferred through a pair of cables, with the possible addition of wireless transmission should [Downing] ever want to revisit this project.

In deciding on what to use for a case, [Downing] had bought a few AG cases from Polycase but found the ergonomics severely lacking. Putting two of the case backs together, he found the resulting structure was actually very comfortable, and with a few simple modifications to add some holes for acorn nuts,

It’s a great looking project that really highlights [Downing]’s talents as a console modder. He’s also thrown his hat into the Hackaday Trinket contest by engraving the Jolly Wrencher into the back of his project, which unfortunately isn’t seen in the video below.

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Dual Displays On A Playstation 2

April 2, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

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At the Revision 2013 demoparty held last weekend, visitors and guests wanting to check out the latest advances in programming old video game consoles got a real treat. [Abyss] took a Playstation 2, connected the composite video out port to a TV and an oscilloscope, and created the first dual display PS2.

From the official video of the demo, the two video signals are generated from a single video out on the PS2. Generating the composite video out is understandably fairly easy, but the second display – an oscilloscope – is driven during the Vblank period in the composite signal. There’s no audio trickery here; video signals are used for video, and audio signals are used for audio.

[Abyss] took first place in the wild demo competition at Revision 2013. Understandably, too, because this is one of the best demos we’ve ever seen. You can check out the official video from [Abyss] after the break, and the wild competition video after the break.

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Building A Rather Rudimentary Arduino Tank Bot

January 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

building-an-arduino-tankbot

The tank robot builds that we see are often quite complex. This lets them do great things, but makes the platform scary for beginners. Here’s a tank build that would be a great first project, especially if you’re more interested in the programming side of robotics than you are in the hardware itself. [Paul Bleisch] combined several different commercially available products to fabricate this Arduino-powered tank robot base.

Locomotion is provided by a double geared-motor module. This unit, the plastic wheels and treads, as well as the wooden mounting platform are all made by Tamiya. They cost very little and are already designed to work with one another. To this base he adds the Arduino and a motor shield which makes the connections dead simple. The black case on one end of the chassis holds four AA batteries which provide power for everything.

These components are all that’s really needed to start, but they provide no interactivity. So [Paul] picked up a used wireless PlayStation 2 controller. There’s a library (written by regular reader [Bill Porter]) that allows him to connect the receiver to the Arduino in order to pick up commands from the controller. He also plans to add an ultrasonic range finder to the build sometime in the future.

If you’re don’t need to do things the easy way you should consider fabricating your own tank treads.

Trumpet Hero

March 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Evilsigntist] combined an old cornet with an old PS2 guitar hero controller to produce the Trumpet Hero. The fragile looking conglomeration really brings a smile to our faces. Just make sure the instrument has already seen the end of its days before drilling holes to mount the various parts.

In the image above you can see that the three valve buttons have been painted to correspond to frets on the original guitar controller. The orange and blue frets are positioned for the left hand to operate. There seems to be a couple of different version because there is a diagram showing a mute in the bell that can be twisted for whammy bar input, but that’s not shown here. Strumming is accomplished by blowing through the mouthpiece, but as you can see in the video after the break, no buzzing is necessary.

Using actual instruments as game inputs is a lot of fun. We always think back to the flute and drum set controllers for Rock Band.

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Cubicle-dwellers Rewarded For Reflexes

January 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUqRcLjFOUc]

[StudioJooj] is trying to torture or test his colleagues in his office. A lot of folks leave a candy jar on their desks for all to enjoy but he’s making his friends work for their reward. Like cubicle-dwelling lab subjects, they must successfully navigate his maze to be rewarded with chocolate. The game piece is an amazingly orb-like peanut M&M candy. The maze is constructed from plywood and moves on two axis with the help of a couple of servos. The user interface includes a couple of NES console buttons to release the game piece and a PS2 joystick to control the maze. [StudioJooj] was nice enough to include a music video in his project clip.

We wonder the M&Ms will disappear faster or slower than they would from a candy jar.

[via SparkFun]