Enjoy This Animatronic Eyeball’s Smooth Moves

April 8, 2022 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

[Enza3D] shows off a surprisingly compact articulated animatronic eyeball that can be intuitively controlled with a Wii nunchuk controller. The design uses 3D printed parts and some tiny servos, and all of the necessary electronics can be easily purchased online. The mechanical design of the eye is very impressive, and [Enza3D] walks through several different versions of the design, the end result of which is a tidy little assembly that would fit nicely into masks, costumes, or other projects.

A Wii nunchuk is ideal for manual control of such a device, thanks to its ergonomic design and ease of interface (the nunchuk communicates over I²C, which is easily within the reach of even most modest of microcontrollers.) Of course, since driving servos is also almost trivial nowadays, it doesn’t look like working this into an automated project would pose much of a challenge.

The eyeball looks great, but if you want to try for yourself, accessing the design files and code will set you back $10 which might look attractive if an eye like this is the missing link for a project.

On the other hand, enjoying the video (embedded below) and getting ideas from [Enza3D]’s design notes will only cost you a few minutes.

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Custom Bluetooth Joystick In A Nunchuk Shell

April 26, 2020 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

With the Wii’s unique controller, Nintendo not only provided new gaming experiences to players, but gave hardware hackers a platform for experimentation that’s still going strong. Case in point, this modification of a third party Wii “Nunchuk” by [Giliam de Carpentier] that turns the accessory into a stand-alone wireless controller powered by a ATtiny44A.

It turns out there’s a considerable amount of free space inside the Nunchuk case, so [Giliam] found adding in the new hardware wasn’t nearly as difficult as you might expect. Of course, it helps that the diminutive SMD ATtiny44A and its support hardware are housed on a very neatly milled PCB that attaches to the back of the original board.

Most of the other hardware comes in the form of modular components, like the Bluetooth transmitter and TP4056 charge controller for the 300 mAh battery. A micro USB charging port is mounted where the original Nunchuk cable entered the case, making the whole thing look very professional.

Even if you aren’t interested in making your own controller, [Giliam] covers many interesting topics in this write-up such as handling different methods of Bluetooth connectivity and various power management techniques to eke out as much life from the relatively small battery as possible. It’s not only a fascinating read, but a great example of what thorough project documentation should look like.

In the past we’ve seen Bluetooth conversions for the Wii Nunchuck, but traditionally they left the original electronics in place. On the other side of the spectrum, we’ve also seen the internals get replaced with something as powerful as the Raspberry Pi Zero.

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Space Invaders Played On A 16×2 Character Display

February 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

This Space Invaders game does more with less. [Rjk79] managed to make a video game using a two-line character display. The game consists of a wave of invaders on the top line, with the defender cannon on the bottom. The invader isn’t just stationary, but randomly moves to the left and the right. The image above captured a little bit of motion blur from the defender moving into position before firing on the enemy.

An Arduino board controls the 16×2 HD44780 character display. The game also includes sounds generated by the piezo buzzer seen on the breadboard. All the way to the right you can see the Wii Nunchuk breakout board which provides directional control and the firing trigger. If you want to recreate this one for yourself [Rjk79] is sharing the source code on Pastebin. There’s also a demo video found after the jump.

If you don’t have a character LCD on hand you might try this other Space Invaders clone that uses an 8×8 led matrix.

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