Super Mario Lamp Encourages Physical Activity

February 11, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

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What better way to encourage jumping around in the house than by adding your own Super Mario style question block lamps?

It’s a fun and easy project to do because it makes use of an IKEA Sangen lamp — it just needs some slight modifications and a bit of art work to turn it into this iconic question block. You will be working with mains voltage though, so please be careful!

The lamp itself is made out of fabric which means it can be taken apart easily, and then dyed that classic orange hue. Using a stencil you can spray paint on the question mark and then it’s just a matter of adding a springy-latching-pressure-switch (that’s the technical term for them right?) in line with the light bulb. Results may vary, but [Anred] has a great guide on how to make it to get you started.

Now all that’s missing is a sound effect to go with the switch!

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NESBot Video Game Automation

February 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

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If you happen to enjoy video games, but don’t actually like playing them, boy do we have the hack for you! [pjgat09] shows us how, armed with an Arduino, you can force a Nintendo to play games by itself, not unlike an old-time player piano. The hack involves programming an Arduino to accept commands mapped out in “movies”, which are actually scripted sets of button presses that one would perform while playing a game. These sorts of scripts are available from TASVideo, a community specializing in “tool assisted” speed runs of video games. These movies are typically used with emulators, so there are some adjustments that need to be made in order to make them work with a console, since the button presses are mapped to each frame that is drawn on the screen. While we are not sure quite how useful this hack is, it is a pretty novel concept. You can see video of the 5-minute SMB speed run after the jump.

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Simple Liquid Dispenser For Auto-cocktails

December 7, 2009 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Qdot] came up with a simple way to dosing out liquids to use in his Bartris project. As you can see above, flexible tubing is connected to some inverted bottles that house the liquid. A chopstick is attached to a board on one end, and via string to a servo on the other. When the servo turns it pulls the chopstick tight against the board, cutting off the flow of liquid through the tubing. This isn’t as elegant as the system the Bar2D2 uses but it’s a heck of a lot less expensive.

You can check out some of the build pictures in his Flickr pool. He’s included this concept in a project he calls Adult Mario. Watch the video after the break but the quick and dirty is that the more coins you score in Super Mario Brothers, the more beverage is rationed out into your cup. Ah, human lab rats, is there nothing they won’t do for booze?

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AVGA: The AVR Based Video Game Platform

August 12, 2009 by Nick Caiello 16 Comments

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We’ve seen our fair share of AVR projects, but this one’s pretty cool. AVGA is a color video game development platform based on the Atmel AVR family of microcontrollers. As seen in the picture above, one of the AVRs that the project uses is the popular ATMega168. There were several technical hurdles to using the AVRs to run color video games; one of the most difficult problems was figuring out a way to display detailed graphics from AVRs limited onboard RAM. Eventually, the developers figured out a way to display detailed graphics using a TILE-based driver. The TILE driver works by dividing the screen into X and Y coordinates, dividing the graphics into tiles. Then, when a graphic is needed it’s addressed from a reference table that’s stored in the AVR’s onboard RAM, allowing the bitmap graphic to be loaded from a game’s ROM. Currently, the only games available for the platform are a Super Mario clone, a Pacman clone, and a Snake clone. While there are only a few games available, the platform definitely looks promising. If anything, this project serves as a great example for what off the shelf microcontrollers are capable of.