Hackaday Links: September 23, 2018

September 23, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

In the spirit of Nintendo’s NES mini and Super NES mini, Sony is releasing a tiny version of the Playstation. It’s a hundred bucks in December and it comes with Final Fantasy VII, what more do you want? While that’s marginally cool, check out the forums and comments of gaming blogs for some real entertainment — those damn kids won’t get off my lawn and are complaining the included controllers don’t have analog sticks.

This man has solved the range problem for electric cars. He hacked a Prius to run off the overhead wires for San Francisco’s Muni system. Yes, if you want something amazing, here it is. The pantograph/pole/whatever it’s called was acquired ‘somehow’, with the implication that it was stolen. The overhead lines are 600 V, and a Prius’ battery pack is usually 273 V; apparently he “uses up the excess power on a whole lot of resistors, full-time headlights, and a kick-ass stereo system.”. Dear lord, we need a real technical write-up for this one.

Humanity’s most impressive accomplishment to date is Twitch Plays Pokemon. This was a cooperative game of Pokemon, with thousands of people mashing buttons. Everyone (eventually) beat the Final Four, but the most impressive part was the Power Plant. We made it through the Power Plant, and we got Zapdos. I was there. It was incredible. Twitch Plays Pokemon has been reborn and rebranded several times, but this one might be good: Twitch Programs a Commodore 64. It’s a (virtual) C64 hooked up to Twitch. If there’s one person watching the channel, you can slowly type out a BASIC program one… character… at… a… time. If there’s more than one person watching, the entire ordeal devolves into the horrors of a democracy, but you might be able to get something done. Have fun.

Live Streaming Goes Pro With A Hacked Backpack

September 3, 2018 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

If you haven’t been paying attention, live streaming has become a big business. Streamers are getting out of their basements and moving around among us. While IRL streams may not be our cup of tea, the technology behind creating a solid high upstream bandwidth wireless internet connection is. Sure you can stream with a phone, the top streamers want something a bit more reliable. Enter [Gunrun], who has designed a backpack just for mobile streaming.

The backpack starts with a Sony AS300 Camera. [Gunrun] likes this particular camera for its exceptional audio capabilities. Network connections are handled with no less than four LTE modems. You never know which carrier will have good service out in the field, so the modems are available from a variety of carriers.

The real problem is bonding connections between LTE modems from various carriers, setting up streaming accounts, and piping captured data from an HDMI capture over those accounts. The average hacker would go at it with an HDMI capture card and a Linux Laptop. Most streamers need a more plug and play solution though, so [Gunrun] uses a LiveU Solo HDMI video encoder for the task.

This isn’t a cheap solution, all those parts together along with a beefy battery, LTE data plans, and of course a backpack to hold it all makes for a package north of $2000. Even at this price, plenty of streamers have been following [Gunrun’s] instructions and building their own setup.

Hackers do a bit of live streaming too – check out how [cnlohr] reverse engineered the Vive, while valve engineers played along in the chat.

Twitch Plays Battling Robots?

August 8, 2018 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Audience interaction reached an all-time high in 2014 with Twitch Plays Pokemon, an online gaming stream where viewers were able to collaboratively command an emulated Game Boy playing Pokemon Red. Since then, the concept has taken off. Today, we see this extended to robots in the real world, with [theotherlonestar]’s Twitch Chat Controlled Robots.

The build is one that takes advantage of modern off-the-shelf components – an ESP8266 provides the brains, while a Pololu Zumo provides a ready to go robot chassis to save time on the mechanical aspects of the build. An L298N dual motor controller then handles motive power.

The real ingenuity though, is teaching the robots to respond to commands from Twitch chat. The chat is available in a readily parsable IRC format, which makes programming around it easy. [theotherlonestar] created a command set that enables the robots to be driven remotely by stream viewers, and then outfitted the ‘bots with hammers with which to fight, as well as a fedora to tip, if one is so inclined.

It’s a cool build, and one which shows further promise as Twitch continues to reduce stream & chat latency. We look forward to seeing future battles, but the first one already excites.

Interested in where it all began? Check out our Twitch Plays Pokemon coverage from way back when. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Twitch Plays Battling Robots?” →

Bananas Against Racism

July 20, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 42 Comments

This is a tale as old as time. Not love, it is about keeping something you made safe from those who would destroy something beautiful. In this case, the thing of beauty is a talking banana who reads Twitch and Youtube comments. The ne’er-do-wells are trolls seeking to ban-anana the account by forcing it to recite restricted words.

The problems stem from a visit from [Greekgodx], whose followers tend toward the dark side. When they set their sights on [Mike Nichols]’ yellow automaton, things slipped into a bleak place, and a twenty-four-hour ban falls on the fruit. A bunch of filtering is done, but it isn’t enough to stop the trolls, and the tally-man adds a second permanent strike against the account. An arms race of slurs and filtering ensued until the robot was able to reject all attempts at racism.

The banana has since been peeled from the feeds, but if silly robots are your cup of tea, check out [Simone Giertz] turning a car into a computer mouse.

Continue reading “Bananas Against Racism” →

Twitch Stream Turned Infinity Mirror

July 18, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Most Hackaday readers are likely to be familiar with the infinity mirror, a piece of home decor so awesome that Spock still has one up on the wall in 2285. The idea is simple: two parallel mirrors bounce and image back and forth, which creates a duplicate reflection that seems to recede away into infinity. A digital version of this effect can be observed if you point a webcam at the screen that’s displaying the camera’s output. The image will appear to go on forever, and the trick provided untold minutes of fun during that period in the late 1990’s where it seemed everyone had a softball-shaped camera perched on their CRT monitors.

While you might think you’ve already seen every possible variation of this classic visual trick, [Matt Nishi-Broach] recently wrote in to tell us about an infinity mirror effect he’s created using the popular streaming platform Twitch. The public is even invited to fiddle with the visuals through a set of commands that can be used in the chat window.

It works about how you’d expect: the stream is captured, manipulated through various filters, and then rebroadcast through Twitch. This leads to all sorts of weird visual effects, but in general gives the impression that everything is radiating from a central point in the distance.

While [Matt] acknowledges that there are probably not a lot of other people looking to setup their own Twitch feedback loops, he’s still made his Python code available for anyone who might be interested. There’s a special place in Hacker Valhalla for those who release niche software like this as open source. They’re the real MVPs.

If you’d like to get started on your infinite journey with something a bit more physical, we’ve covered traditional infinity mirror builds ranging from the simplistic to the gloriously over-engineered.

D.Va For Real: Playing An FPS With Flight Sticks

August 20, 2016 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

[Rudeism] loves playing Blizzard’s hit game Overwatch. He wanted to make his gaming experience a bit more realistic though. One of the characters is D.Va, who according to game lore is a member of the South Korean Mobile Exo-Force (MEKA). D.Va pilots her MEKA in game using two joysticks. Overwatch is a standard FPS with WASD and mouse controls, so the realism ends at the screen.

[Rudeism] didn’t let that stop him. He used two flight sticks to create the ultimate D.Va experience. [Twitch recording link – language warning] A commercial software package called Xpadder allowed him to map movements on the joystick to mouse and keystrokes. The left joystick maps to WASD, left shift, Q, and right click. The right stick corresponds to mouse movements, E, and left click.

This isn’t exactly the tank style steering we’re used to from classic mech games like Virtual-On, but it’s pretty good for a software solution. It makes us wonder what would be possible with a bit of hardware hacking – perhaps a Teensy handling the analog and button inputs.

People have been coming up with interesting ways to play video games for years. Check out this hack with the classic Microsoft Kinect, or these arcade hacks.

Via Reddit

Delightfully Horrible Idea: Twitch Installs Linux

October 30, 2015 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

Linux is a delightful OS. There are an amazing range of built-in tools, and innumerable others that can be installed from publicly available repositories using just a single line of commands. You can also hose your entire system with just a handful of characters; something that was en vogue as a method of trolling many years ago. Who knows if either of those will get used when Twitch Installs Arch Linux.

Beginning on Saturday morning, a single keyboard will be controlled by thousands of people whose collective goal is to install a Linux distro in a virtual box. There will undoubtedly be thousands of others trying to thwart the process. We were enthralled with Twitch Plays Pokemon last year. Live viewers’ keystrokes were translated to the Game Boy controls and the majority consensus decided the next move. This was insane with just a few controls, but now we’re talking about an entire keyboard.

Every 10 seconds, the most popular keystroke will be chosen. To put this in perspective, the previous sentence would have taken exactly 10 minutes to type, and only if the majority constantly agreed on what the next letter should be. We can’t tell if it’s going to be interesting or boring to participate. But either way, we can’t wait to see what unforeseen happenings shake out of the process.