If you’ve got a cartridge-based gaming system, this EPROM burner will let you load whatever game you want!

Robson Couto recently acquired an old SNES. A great console for its time, but it only came with one cartridge, a bootleg copy of Mortal Kombat. Legalities aside, he decided that he would experiment with his own bootleg cartridge creator via an EPROM burner made as an Arduino Mega shield.

His process involves finding an unwanted game cartridge (he prefers sports, though your results may vary), burn the ROM, then exchange the cartridge ROM for the newly-burned ROM.

According to Couto, EPROM is “easier to program than flash.” and you can see how he did it on his blog post here. Code for the project is also available on GitHub.

With a speaker on the back and a drum machine on the front, what can possibly go wrong?

After riding his bike home after a synthesizer get together, Sam Battle decided to actually combine these two pursuits, transforming an iconic 1973 Raleigh Chopper into a mobile synthesizer. Though his first try was rather crude, using an Oyster card stuck between spokes to trigger a switch, his aptly named “Synth Bike 2.0” looks pretty awesome.

Featuring eight–yes eight–Arduino Nano boards, the music’s tempo can be controlled by how fast you pedal, or set up to use a built-in clock. Other electronics include a Sparkfun WAV Trigger, some analog synth circuitry, a sampler, a digital oscillator, and a Music From Outer Space Echo module.

Plenty of switches, dials, pads and knobs can be found on a control box mounted to the handlebars, while more pads are located on the bike’s top tube.

As awesome as it looks, all of this electronic gear seems to suck a lot of power, and it can only play for around 10 minutes at a stretch. A battery upgrade, however, is reportedly imminent!

Over the last couple of years, cat videos have become the undisputed champions of the web. Whether it’s kittens playing with their shadows to failed jump attempts to giving each another massages, we’re all guilty of watching a few of these clips from time to time (yes, even at work). Built with this in mind, oCat is a real-time tracker for feline-related activity on the Internet.

oCat consists of two parts: the oCat News Distractor and the Kitty o’Cat Twitter bot. Using Google’s YouTube API, the system works by continuously monitoring for new uploads, the number of new views each day, or a specific video that has received a remarkable amount of attention. It then tweets these stats and prints them out on thermal paper, stamping a paw print on the timeline for every 1,000 views.

Created by Annika Engelhardt, a digital media design master’s student at the University of the Arts in Bremen, oCat uses an Arduino along with an ESP Wi-Fi module, a servo, and an LCD screen. The aim of the project is to increase and reveal the amount of hours people spend watching cat videos online.

The cat is an altered Maneki-neko, holding a stamp using welding wire and hot glue. Even though I filled the stamp with extra ink, it did not work properly and I had to cut out the paw-shape from a sponge and glue it onto the original stamp.

The thermal printer used in the device needs a USB connection, so I used a Raspberry Pi to control it. I wrote a Python script that checks four different RSS news feeds for new posts every 15 minutes and prints one headline with a timestamp every minute.

The Twitter bot was programmed using Python and a library called tweepy. Most of the script is reading JSON files, juggling and comparing data and text files and in the end mixing up parts of a sentence to form a tweet. The bot will be enhanced in the future

Engelhardt exhibited the project at Galerie Flut in Bremen back in October. You can find more pictures and information on the project here.

These toy cars are modified for sip-and-puff controls, where one lightly sucks or blows air as an interface.

If you have certain disabilities, use of your hands can be difficult if not impossible. An alternative is an interface known as sip-and-puff, which allows for control of electronics by producing a small air flow with your breath. In the build shown in the videos below, Bob Paradiso integrated this type of command into two types of RC vehicles.

To operate the first vehicle, one simply uses puffs to go forward, while sips make the car go backwards. The second is much more advanced, with a double-puff making the car go forward, a double-sip for backwards, and single puffs and sips to turn left or right.

There are many sip-and-puff controls on the market for various things, but they can be expensive or difficult to customize. What I’m showing here is an extremely affordable, simple to build, and fully customizable sip-and-puff setup used to control two different remote control toys that have very different controls.

You can see Paradiso’s writeup here and check out the code on the project’s GitHub page.

“Tony the Pinball Wizard” has successfully 3D-printed a fully-functional pinball machine.

The retired software engineer provides a detailed writeup, beginning with pinball’s roots in the 1700s to its eventual fall from popularity in the 1990s and 2000s. If you find this interesting, you could likely pick one up on Craigslist, but Tony instead decided to build his own.

This process isn’t for the feint of heart though, as it took him over 200 hours to design the game, and another 1,200 or more hours to 3D print everything. Materials included 8.5 kilometers of filament, of which 85 types were used. The whole thing is powered by a pair of Arduino Mega boards, needed to accommodate the massive number of inputs and outputs required.

The machine was brought to life and displayed inside 3D FilaPrint’s stand at recent industry trade show. You can see Tony’s excellent project in action below and read all about it here.

Congratulations to the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize, Alberto Molina Perez! Inspired by Bruce Lee’s famous water quote, Dtto is a self-reconfigurable robot that can adopt any shape by simply changing the position and connection of its 3D-printed modules.

A coupling mechanism on both ends allows the sections to assemble themselves in various configurations and carry out complex tasks in unison. They can chain together to create a snake-like robot, turn into a wheel, or even form a bridge to get over a gap. Impressively, this is all accomplished autonomously. The goal is that, one day, Dtto’s versatility will enable it to perform rescue missions and explore unknown environments without any human intervention.

As Hackaday notes, each module consists of two boxes, rounded on one side, linked by a bar. One half houses all of the electronics, which includes an Arduino Nano, a Bluetooth chip, an NRF2401+ radio transceiver, two SG92R Tower Pro servos for hinging, and three Tower Pro SG90 micro servos for coupling, while the other leaves space for additional features, such as a camera, microphone and speakers, multiple sensors, actuators, or more batteries.

You can read more about the project on its Hackaday.io page, and be sure to check out its latest demo reel below!

Using a Kinect sensor with MATLAB/Simulink and an Arduino, B.Avinash and J.Karthikeyan made a robotic arm to mimic their every move.

If you need a robotic arm to follow your movements, the Kinect sensor is a great place to start. On the other hand, it’s a long leap programming-wise to go from sensor input to coordinated movement of servo motors. Through a toolchain stretching from the sensor itself, to a computer, and finally to an Arduino Mega controlling the servos directly, Avinash and Karthikeyan did just that.

For their process, the computer takes data from the Kinect sensor, then translates it into servo angles using the MATLAB and Simulink computer programs. Resulting data is then fed into the Arduino via a serial connection, which controls the robot’s movements appropriately with a slight delay.

Be sure to check out the project’s Instructables page to learn more about this awesome build!

To complement his VR experience, Florian Mauer built a controller that could perhaps best be described as a “hand bracelet.”

As virtual reality applications begin to be implemented, one challenge will be finding an interface device, or combination of them that are unobtrusive, yet allow for versatile input. Mauer decided on a design inspired by the gravity control bracelet from the movie “Ender’s Game.” It can be worn similar to how a pistol is held (illustrated here with a virtual pistol), and reportedly doesn’t get in the way when using a keyboard or mouse–at least before the button was added.

The 3D-printed gadget features an IMU, Arduino Pro Micro, as well as a couple buttons for in-game actions. This helps the Leap Motion controller used here to recognize gestures that would be difficult for its camera to pick up otherwise.

In the 2013 adaptation of Ender’s Game, Harrison Ford’s character slips a metallic device over his hand to control gravity in the training room. This scene inspired me as I’ve been trying to imagine VR controllers that can be used alongside mouse+keyboards. The controller used by Ford seemed convenient to put on, offer a lot of finger freedom, and probably allow for throwing VR objects without falling off.

You can see more information on this promising project on Mauer’s website here.

Ever find yourself drumming on Pringles cans with your fingers? This hack adds a MIDI output to make it sound awesome!

If you’re tired of playing virtual drums on an iPad or other device, and need some tactile feedback, snack-sized Pringles cans not only sort of resemble drums, but provide a nice “bounce” when hit by a finger or thumb. All that’s required, besides washing the lid and canister to remove grease, is the attachment of a piezoelectric sensor to the lid to detect taps. These impulses are then fed to an Arduino Micro, converting everything into a MIDI signal, which can be read by your favorite electronic instrument.

With a bit of luck, you can plug it straight in to a MIDI drum synth and start playing. The four pads transmit kick drum, snare, closed hi-hat and open hi-hat note values according to the General MIDI specification.

You can find more information on this excellent hack on its Instructables page, or check out the video below to see it in action!

Interactive kinetic installations are always incredible to see in action, but they become even more awesome when they’re part of a performance. As in the case of Infinite Delta, which is the result of Boris Chimp 504 + Alma D’ Arame’s artistic residency at Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal.

Using Arduino boards, they built a physical structure comprised of triangular planes that swing back and forth like a pendulum, controlled by a series of servo motors. Light is projected onto the moving structures, creating patterns that are then reflected onto a nearby wall. Infinite Delta also modifies its shape in response to the movement and sound of the audience.

In Euclidean geometry any three points, when non-collinear, form a unique triangle and determine a unique plane. Nevertheless, in quantum physics the string theory proposes that fundamental particles may also have similarities with a string. It also states that the universe is infinite and in it all matter is contained. In this “multiverse”, our universe would be just one of many parallel existent universes. What would happen then if we multiply triangles infinitely? Could or would we have access to those parallel universes?

The performers augmented the physical world by overlaying it into the digital world to produce a new alternative, magic and hyper-sensorial landscape.