Author: sweethess

It wasn’t as well long back that a person might conjecture that a lot of hackers are not avid video game players. We spend a lot of of our complimentary time taking things apart, tinkering with microcontrollers as well as reading the current [Jenny List] post on Hackaday.com. When we do believe of video games, our neurons normally terminate in the direction of emulating a console on a single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone. Or even emulating the actual console processor on an FPGA. seldom do we venture off into 3D programs indicated to make contemporary video games. If we can’t export an .STL with it, we’re not interested. It’s just not our bag.

Oculus Rift altered this. The VR headset was originally developed for 3D video games, however swiftly ended up being a darling to hackers the world over. online truth innovation is far bigger than just video games, as well as brings chance to lots of fields such as genuine estate, construction, product visualization, education, social interaction… the listing goes on as well as on.

The Oculus team got together with the people over at Unity in the early days to make it simple for video game makers to make material for the Rift. Unity is a game engine created with a shallow discovering curve as well as is offered for complimentary for non-commercial use. The Oculus Rift can be integrated into a Unity atmosphere with the inspect of a setting as well as importing a little package, offered on the Oculus site. This makes it simple for any individual thinking about VR innovation to get a Rift as well as begin pumping out content.

Hackers have taken things a step additionally as well as have written scripts that enable Unity to interact with an Arduino. VR is fun. however VR plus physical truth is just down ideal exciting! In this article, we’re going to walk you with setting up your Oculus Rift as well as Unity game engine to interact with the outside world by means of an Arduino.

Off the shelf Options

If you head over to the Unity possession page as well as run a browse for Arduino, you get a few options. Sadly, searches for Raspberry Pi do not produce any type of fruit. There are a few generic serial communication choices such as basic Serial as well as SD Serial, however these choices are not complimentary as well as do not, at deal with value, appear to be well supported. Unidino looks promising, however it’s thirty bucks as well as there’s not much activity on the forum. The evident option to play around with on a rainy day is ARDunity. There’s a complimentary version that still has lots of ability to experiment with, as well as it’s well supported as well as documented.  It’s written in a lot more of a WYSIWYG style that can be off-putting to coders, however it will have to suffice up until somebody bangs out a lot more advanced version.

Getting Started

We’re presuming that you already have Arduino as well as Oculus configuration on your PC. If you don’t have an Oculus Rift, we suggest to go to the Oculus site as well as set up the software application anyway. It will enable you to test the Unity/Arduino communication with the Oculus run-time even if you don’t have the hardware. This method when you do get a headset, you won’t have to do anything. just execute the .exe as well as you’ll see your work in VR. note that they utilized to stop the software application from installing on computers that did not satisfy the minimum requirements. Oculus has considering that toned down this nuisance, as well as now enables the software application to be installed on a lot of computers, including laptops!

Setting up Unity is directly ahead – just go to the site as well as download the installer. the current version at the time of this post is 5.6.1. You’ll want to get hold of the personal version – it’s about five Gigabytes, so provide it a long time to download. when installed, head over to the Oculus site as well as get hold of the Unity tools import package.

Open Unity as well as open a new project. then head back to the Unity possession store as well as set up the ARDunity fundamental Import package.  This will open Unity, as well as you must see a tab called possession Store. click on the tab as well as then import the package. then go to Edit–>Project Settings–>Player as well as set the API compatibility level to .NET 2.0. This will remove the error you see in the bottom of the screen. then under other Settings, be sure to choose the online truth supported option.

Now import the Oculus bundle by going to Asset–>Import Package–>Custom bundle as well as point towards the Oculus bundle you downloaded earlier. Restart the Unity program if needed.

Putting everything Together

At this point, whatever must be set to get Unity speaking to your Arduino with the Oculus Rift. put an LED on D2 as well as note your comm port.  From the job tab (lower left),  broaden the folders ARDunity–>Examples–>LED–>Digital. double click the last example – ReactingTrigger(DigitalLED).unity.

That will tons the example. You must now see two cubes in the view window, as well as a new folder called ARDunity under the hierarchy tab on the top left. click on ARDunity as well as you’ll see the inspector tab (far right) modification to include a button that states “Export Sketch”. hit the button as well as it will export the Arduino sketch to a location of

View of scene after opening LED example
your choosing. The .ccp as well as .h data will be produced automatically, together with some other dependencies. I shouldn’t have to tell you to have a look around, however don’t fail to remember to compile as well as publish it after you’ve had your fill.

Just below the Export Sketch button will be the Comm Serial (Script) window. browse for as well as choose the comm port for you Arduino. After you discover your comm port, hit the bit play button on top of the primary scene window. when you do this, you’ll see a “Connect” button appear where the Export Sketch was. Go ahead as well as connect. now click on the Scene tab above the primary checking out window. This will enable you to manipulate the cubes. Go ahead as well as get hold of the white cube as well as run it into the eco-friendly one. If you did whatever right, you’ll see your LED light when the two cubes collide.

The gears in your noggin must be turning ideal about now… if you can toggle IO from within a game engine; there is some seriously great stuff you can do! however we’ve only scratched the surface. Let’s get this working in online Reality!

Enter the Rift

In buy to go into the online world, you requirement a couple of things. One is a character controller as well as the other is something to walk on. hit the play button once again if you haven’t already. This will disconnect whatever as well as enable you to edit the world. go to game Object–>3D Object–>Plane as well as change the airplane so the two cubes are hovering above it. then un-collapse the ARDuino as well as broaden the OVR folder to OVR–>Prefabs. choose the OVRPlayerController.prefab as well as drag it into the primary hierarchy in the upper left. You’ll see the player controller appear in the primary scene window. Drag it away from the cubes, as well as then under the inspector tab on the ideal hand side, de-select the utilize profile data choice in the OVR player Controller (Script) section.

Now, choose ARDuino under the hierarchy tab, press play as well as then connect. If you have an Oculus Rift connected, you must be able to put it on as well as run into the eco-friendly cube as well as light the LED on the Arduino. If you don’t have one, just utilize the arrow secrets to do the same.

Conclusion

So where can you opt for this? The greatest thing that jumps out to us is haptic feedback. envision instead of a cube, you have a wall or table or something of that nature. have the Arduino activate some type of comments when you touch or bump into the object.

Dig into the code as well as let us understand of any type of bugs or improvements. Be sure to comply with some other examples as well, as well as inspect out the video below for a demonstration. If you’ve done anything great with Unity, show us in the comments.

What’s the very best method to get around NYC? If you asked [papo2110], he would most likely suggest you develop your own high-speed, long-range electric skateboard. You can’t cruise with any type of on the internet maker neighborhood without tripping over a lots e-vehicle jobs these days. almost 18 months ago, even before the prominent Boosted Boards Kickstarter, [papo2110] started piecing together a deck. His boards utilize a brushless outrunner motor, an RC cars and truck ESC (complete with brakes), as well as a chain drive to power him around central Park at a top speed of 23mph.

The many outstanding accomplishment for this project, however, is the tireless revision with iterative design. The deck gets both an aluminum as well as a carbon fiber upgrade. Meaty 8S Headway LiFePo4’s replace a smaller 6S configuration. even lights are added. As the develop progresses, the board is pushing 27mph: with only one motor. get your helmet as well as motion-sickness pills as well as strap in for some videos after the break.

If four wheels are one as well numerous as well as you want even much more harmful speeds, inspect out the E-trike develop from a few months ago.

Some people look at specifications as a requirement, and others look at them as a challenge. You’re reading this on Hackaday, so you know where [Necroware] falls. In the video below the break, you’ll see how he takes a common mid-to-late 90’s motherboard and takes it well past its spec sheet.

[Necroware] does what all soldering iron ads think people finish with soldering ironsHaving already started with replacing the real Time Clock with his own creation, [Necroware] looked for other opportunities to make the Asus P/I-P55TP4XEG much more capable than Asus did. And, he succeeded. Realizing that the motherboard has the ability to have an external voltage regulator board, [Necroware] made one so that the Socket 7 board could supply much more than a single voltage to the CPU- the very thing keeping him from upgrading from a Pentium 133 to a Pentium MMX 200.

While the upgrade was partially successful, a deep dive into the Socket 7 and very Socket 7 documentation helped him realize the need for a pullup resistor on a tactical clocking pin. Then, [Necroware] went full Turbo and smashed this author’s favorite single core CPU of all time into the socket: the AMD K6-2 450, a CPU well beyond the original capabilities of the board.

It really goes to show that, of course, It’s All about The Pentiums. thanks to [BaldPower] for the doing the needful and dropping this terrific hack into the suggestion Line!

If you ever feel a pang of shame because you’ve been reusing the same snippets of code in your projects for years, don’t. even the big names do it, as evidenced by the fact that code written to govern flickering lights back in 1996 for Quake is still being used in AAA titles like 2020’s Half-Life: Alyx. In honor of this renowned example of digital buck-passing, [Rodrigo Feliciano] thought he’d port the code in question over to the Arduino and recreate the effect in real-life.

Since the Quake engine has been released under the GPLv2, it’s easy to pull up the relevant section of the code to see how the lighting was configured. Interestingly, lighting patterns were implemented as strings, where the letters from a to z referenced how bright the light ought to appear. So for example, a strobe light that goes between minimum and maximum brightness would be written as “aaaaaaaazzzzzzzz”, while a flickering light could be represented with the string “nmonqnmomnmomomno“.

An emergency light offered the LEDs and enclosure.
This ended up being very easy to execute on the Arduino in just a few lines, as [Rodrigo] simply had to assign each letter in the string a numerical value between 0 and 255 using map, and then use the resulting number to set the LED brightness with analogWrite.

With the code written, [Rodrigo] then had to put the hardware together. He stripped down a basic emergency light to get an range of white LEDs and a useful enclosure. He also wired up a easy transistor circuit on a scrap of perfboard so the Arduino pro small could control all the LEDs from a single GPIO pin. combined with a long USB cable television to power it, and he’s got a ideal desk accessory for late-night gaming sessions.

In the video below you can see the final result, which [Rodrigo] has even synced up to footage from the classic 1996 shooter. The light makes for an interesting conversation piece, but we think the logical next step is to work this technique into an ambilight-like system to really make it feel like you’re wandering down those dimly lit corridors.

[Nicholas Rehm] works during the day at the used Physics lab at Johns Hopkins, Maryland, so has significant experience with a range of UAV applications. The concern arose about exactly how the determination mars rover landing worked, which prompted [Nicholas] to hang a rock under his drone, connected by means of a winch. This verified to be interesting. however what is a lot more fascinating for us, is what occurs when you try to connect an inverted pendulum to the top of a drone in flight? (video embedded, below)

This is a classic manage theory problem, where you requirement to determine the angle of the pendulum with respect to the base, as well as close the loop by calculating the needed acceleration from the pendulum angle. normally this is demonstrated in one dimension only, however it is only a bit a lot more challenging to balance a pendulum with two degrees of freedom.

[Nicholas] very first tried to obtain the pendulum angle by just eliminating the centering springs from an analog joystick, as well as utilizing it to connect the pendulum rod to the drone body. As is rather obvious, this has a huge drawback. The pendulum angle from vertical is now the sum of the joystick angle as well as the drone angle, which with the associated measurement errors, verified to be an unusable setup. Not to be discouraged, [Nicholas] just added one more IMU board to the bottom of the pendulum, as well as kept the joystick system as a pivot only. And, as you can see from the video after the break, this undoubtedly worked.

The flight controller is [Nicholas’] own project, dRehmFlight (GitHub), which is an Arduino library meant for the Teensy 4.0, utilizing the ubiquitous MPU6050 6-DOF IMU. [Nicholas] likewise made an introduction video for the controller, which may verify instructive for those wanting to go down this road to develop their own VTOL aircraft. The code for pendulum experiment is not offered at the time of writing, maybe it will hit the GitHub in the future?

For some a lot more inverted pendulum fun, do inspect out this basic linear sled. We did cover dRehmFlight a bit while back relating to the suspended pendulum, which may likewise worth a look.

Assistive technologies have a pretty big presence here on Hackaday, and this hack is nothing short of interesting. [kerchoo_22] is working on a hands-free video game controller as a final project for her engineering class and we think it’s worth sharing.

The basic premise of the circuit is pretty simple. She DIY’d a few contact switches using conductive plates made of cardboard, duct tape, and aluminum foil. The output of the switch is read by analog input pins on an Arduino Leonardo. When the switches are off, the analog input pins are pulled HIGH using 1 MegaOhm resistors. but when the user hits their head on one of the four conductive pads, the switch is engaged, and the analog input pins are shorted to ground.

The Arduino Leonardo, having a native USB port, is able to directly emulate a keyboard. Each conductive pad is mapped to a different essential press corresponding to different functions within the game. Left, right, shoot, etc. and there you have it, gameplay without using hands or a controller!

Now, it seems as though [kerchoo_22] put an suitable amount of pillow on the head pads, so there probably isn’t much danger of a concussion. Either way, you can never be too careful.

Computers, from the simplest to the most complex, aren’t very useful if they can’t provide feedback to a user. Whether that interface takes the form of a monitor, a speaker, or a simple LED, there’s nearly always some kind of output. one of the most ubiquitous is the ever-present seven-segment display. They’re small, they’re easy to use, and, perhaps most important, they’re cheap.

While the displays themselves are relatively compact, they often require some sort of motorist circuitry — something that translates a digit into voltage at the right pins. These drivers can take up valuable space, especially on a breadboard, and can sometimes make using seven-segment displays cumbersome. Thankfully, [John Lonergan] has a great solution: motorist boards that sit completely underneath the displays. His dual seven-segment hex display project was born out of necessity — he needed it for the breadboard CPU SPAM-1, which was getting a bit too bulky. Each module is two seven-segment displays atop a small PCB. underneath the displays lives an 8-bit pic microcontroller, which acts as a motorist for both of the displays.

It’s so easy to restrict ourselves to thinking in two dimensions when working on electronic design — even designing multilayer PCBs often feels like working on several, distinct two-dimensional areas rather than one three-dimensional one. The concept of stacking components to save space, while fairly straightforward to implement, is a great example of the kind of problem-solving we love to see here at Hackaday. Of course, if you like the idea of 3D circuit design, you have to check out some of these incredible circuit sculptures we’ve featured in the past.