Accessible Controller Plays Around with Modularity

Video games are a great way to have some fun or blow off a little steam when real life becomes laughable. But stock controllers and other inputs are hardly one size fits all. Even if you have no physical issues, they can be too big, too small, or just plain …read more

Continue reading Accessible Controller Plays Around with Modularity

Converted Car Lets Toddlers Tool Around

A few years ago, a professor at the University of Delaware started a project called Go Baby Go. It’s designed to bring fun and affordable mobility to small children with disabilities. The idea is to modify Power Wheels cars to make them easier for disabled kids to operate, and to …read more

Continue reading Converted Car Lets Toddlers Tool Around

Busy Box Beats Baby’s Boredom

We would love to be a fly on the wall Christmas morning to see [Wilksyonreddit]’s kid tear the paper off of this adult-level busy box. Can you imagine the unbridled glee? It should certainly make the arduous six-month build worth the trouble. Here’s hoping the walls are sturdy, because we …read more

Continue reading Busy Box Beats Baby’s Boredom

Barcode Guitar Plays More Than Beep-Bop

One of our favorite things about the rise of hobbyist development ecosystems such as the Arduino is that it’s now possible to make a MIDI controller out of almost anything, as long as you have the the shields and the dedication. We’re glad that [James Bruton] takes the occasional break …read more

Continue reading Barcode Guitar Plays More Than Beep-Bop

Handheld LoRa Joystick For Long-Range Bots

Wanting a simple tool to aid in the development of LoRa controlled robotic projects, [Jay Doscher] put together this very slick one-handed controller based on the 900 MHz Adafruit Feather M0. With a single trigger and a miniature analog joystick it’s a fairly simple input device, but should be just …read more

Continue reading Handheld LoRa Joystick For Long-Range Bots

See If Someone Has Been In Your Drawers With This Simple Alarm

There’s a spy movie – probably from the [James Bond] franchise – in which our hero is staying in a fancy hotel. It’s crawling with enemies, naturally, and eager to see if one has been snooping in his room while he’s out for martinis, he sticks a hair across the …read more

Continue reading See If Someone Has Been In Your Drawers With This Simple Alarm

Up Your Game With a Battle Tested Input Device

If you’re looking to add some realism to your flight setup without converting the guest bedroom into a full-scale cockpit simulator, you might be interested in the compromise [MelkorsGreatestHits] came up with. He bolted a genuine military keypad to his PC joystick and instantly added 100% more Top Gun to …read more

Continue reading Up Your Game With a Battle Tested Input Device

DIY Six Channel Arduino RC Transmitter

It’s wasn’t so long ago that RC transmitters, at least ones worth owning, were expensive pieces of gear. Even more recently than that, the idea of an RC transmitter running an open source firmware would have been considered a pipe dream. Yet today buying cheap imported transmitters and flashing a …read more

Continue reading DIY Six Channel Arduino RC Transmitter

3D-Printed Rotary Dial Keypad Is Wonderfully Useless

Right up front, let us stipulate that we are not making fun of this project. Even its maker admits that it has no practical purpose. But this 3D-printed Commodore-style rotary dial keypad fails to be practical on so many levels that it’s worth celebrating.

And indeed, celebrating deprecated technology appears …read more

Continue reading 3D-Printed Rotary Dial Keypad Is Wonderfully Useless

The Rotary Joystick Can Take A Beating

It’s a well-known fact amongst the older set that games used to be harder. Back in the 1980s, most home computers had awful keyboards, barely adequate joysticks, and the games had to be difficult to have any longevity, because there’s only so much you can fit into a single sided disk. Some of these games became known as joystick killers, due to the repetitive thrashing movements required to win. [Jan] was tired of letting Decathlon and its ilk get the better of him and his controllers, so built a joystick that was up to the task.

The basic concept of …read more

Continue reading The Rotary Joystick Can Take A Beating