Your source for daily hacks

Category: For the science

Published on: September 3, 2013 / Comments: 1

SNESoIP puts your controller on the net

The project it currently in its early stage, but fully functional and could be used to play multiplayer games over the Internet.
The sheer fact that people seem to spend a great deal of time modernizing vintage consoles tells you one thing, that retro gaming is awesome.  The SNESoIP project is not a full solution for playing SNES games (on a real console I might add, not an emulator) over the internet, but it is a start.

The concept here is to basically move the controllers to a packet format that can be manipulated over networking.  On the hardware side, it’s basically a box with an ethernet cable and a SNES controller jack.  It looks like the processor is an ATmega8 with an enc28j60 for ethernet (which was mentioned earlier as a cheap Arduino solution).

The project is open source, has source code, schematic, and pcb files here on github.

Published on: August 16, 2013 / Comments: None

Overclock your Arduino with liquid nitrogen

After initially overclocking the Arduino to 32.5mhz, Mikhail started experimenting with pushing the Arduino further.  First he was able to up the supply voltage to 8V and nudge it up to 37mhz.  It’s a commonly known trend in the pc overclocking world that you can usually overclock further with more cooling.  So without ramping up from things like water cooling, Mikhail jumps into super-cooling the Arduino with liquid nitrogen.

Liquid nitrogen is around -196 degrees Celsius.  With the liquid nitrogen bath, he was able to get the Arduino running to just over 65mhz.  At this point the looped test sketch running on it started failing.  But before getting that far, from previous tests he ran into issues with the Arduino’s brown out detection.  After replacing some of the capacitors and disabling the blown-out fuse and moving the LCD’s power supply away from the Arduino he was good to go.

 

You know the best part of this hack, and always my favorite is that it’s for the hell of it.  This is obviously not something you would put into production or have any real application, that’s why it’s awesome.

Published on: August 9, 2013 / Comments: None

A full-auto gauss machine gun? whaaaat?

Although not entirely practical or efficient, electro-magnetic guns are cool.  And if done right, they look really neat too.  This awesome gauss machine gun must be Jason’s passion, as he’s done this sorta thing before.  Most of the time you will see these types of weapons in video games or sci-fi movies, maybe because it isn’t a perfected technology yet.  What I find most amazing about this build is the full-auto mechanism.  It’s not the speediest full auto, but is capable of 7.7 rounds a second.  If you’ve ever tried to create your own auto loader system for anything like this you can appreciate this feat.

Anyhow, you can check out more info here, or just jump into the design or construction of this masterpiece.

Published on: July 29, 2013 / Comments: None

Extreme ultrasonic acoustic levitation!

Ok it’s not really extreme, but it is ultrasonic acoustic levitation. Mike is experimenting with ultrasonic transducers and found that if you get the frequency right these large transducers will actually cause lightweight items like foam balls and smoke to be suspended in mid air by the air density pushing and pulling. I don’t have any ideas for practical applications for this at the moment, but it’s really neat to look at.

I wonder if we could scale this experiment up a little bit, add a cool cnc cut foam object and make it a desk toy.

Check out the video.

Published on: July 28, 2013 / Comments: None

What does your wireless router sound like?

Joo Won Park is doing some pretty creepy noise experiments.   He runs a site called 100 strange sounds and has some pretty awesome audio experiments.  In this one he is using a telephone pickup device, that is converting the EMF noise into sound.  Then he adds a little bit of post processing that alters pitch and envelope.  The result is some pretty creepy stuff honestly.

Another cool experiment of his (that I’ve seen before) is the no-input mixer.  Which is an audio mixer that is in crazy feedback mode and actually doesn’t have any input going to it.  The inefficiencies of the mixer are fed back into its self looping really really fast creating noise.  Then altering the mixer and knobs / sliders cause it to alter into weirder noise.  I recommend checking out more of his videos, this guy has some really cool experiments going on like playing a pool noodle.

Published on: July 26, 2013 / Comments: None

3D printed rifle shoots real .22 bullets, the grizzly

This has been a pretty well-lit target of the mass media, 3D printing firearms. And regardless of if you are for it, or against it, I’m not really into politics so … it’s emerging technology and its amazing. If you’ve ever fired up a 3D printer and printed your own model, you can appreciate the structural engineering that goes into making a gun that actually fires.

About a month ago there was some news of a 3D printed handgun, but this is the first rifle that I’ve seen fire. It’s only a single shot, and its a pretty light-weight bullet. I can’t say much for the safety on this one either seeing how the guy is using a string to fire it and hopefully is hiding behind a wall :)

What I personally would like to see is to take a step backwards and 3D print a custom cap gun (do they still make cap guns?) or those toy guns that used to shoot the little yellow balls.

Anyway check out this video.

Published on: July 25, 2013 / Comments: None

Typing in mid air

Enthralled with the concept  of typing in mid-air, Matthew is determined get this right.  After some previous brainstorming prototyping seen here, he has a second prototype.

The implementation goes pretty low-tech, with wire, rubber gloves, and electrical tape.  The contacts are being fed into a hacked up usb gamepad, and interpreted by a php script reading the usb port. Part of what makes this hack unique is the encoding method, which I’m sure would take some practice to get right but you have to try new stuff to push innovation, right ?

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