Rockband is lots of fun. What can be more fun than rocking out with Rockband on your iPhone? Well the answer is making a robot that is better than you at it! This robot uses sensors to look for the blips streaming down the screen and cool simulated fingers to jam on the touchscreen.  The Arduino code is available so you can make your own iPhone Rockband robot.

Thanks for the tip about this cool Make post John!

"The iPhone touch screen isn’t like most PDAs. It uses a capacitive touch screen. More info about that HERE. It would seem that the iPhone is looking for a finger sized touch, from living flesh. According to the link, the screen actually looks for changes in electrical current. I had some conductive foam laying around, its usually used for shipping sensitive electronics. If I put my finger behind the foam and pressed on the iphone screen, it works. If I used something non conductive, like a plastic pen, the foam would do nothing to the screen. My solution to this was to put thin copper wires into the foam (I also used these wires to attach the foam to the servos) the other end of the wires were wrapped around the handle of an exacto knife. When the Robot is playing the game I touch the handle of the exacto and the robot fingers are able to press the screen."

If you like guitar hero and are into sports then you need to have a look at this Kasabian Football Hero project!

Via: Engadget

"An experiment to create a giant (three stories high!) guitar game controlled with footballs. Football Hero is played by a team of insanely gifted young freestyle footballers. The game is programmed with the Kasabian track Underdog."

Have a look at this cool PSP GO Mod. There isn’t much details since the creator doesn’t speak English.

Thanks Wouter!

Joe from ProtoDojo has made a NES USB Drive with Security out of his old NES controller. Instead of simply hacking the device with a USB drive he wanted to use the controller buttons to add some extra security to the device. When the device is plugged into the computer nothing happens until you enter in the Konami code. When the code is entered in correctly a relay pulls in and applies power to the internal USB drive allowing it to be seen by the computer.

Via: Hack A Day

"It’s fairly straight forward. The arduino constantly polls the controller for button states. When you push a button, it stores that value in an array which always holds the most recent 10 values. Whenever you push the start button, it checks the stored array against a separate array which contains the values for the konami code."

Retro Gamer Drive (Konami Code NES Controller Flash Drive) from ProtoDojo on Vimeo.

Norris Labs has created an interesting Robot called the ChessBot. It doesn’t actually play the game but rather has the ability to move the chess pieces around the board. Just imagine playing a game of chess on this system via webcam instead of playing virtual chess on the net.

"ChessBot takes a hybrid approach that produces a more visually interesting way to move a chess pieces. It uses a Lynxmotion AL5D robotic arm to pick up and place pieces but does not rely totally on the arm to provide placement. The arm itself is mounted on a mobile platform (called the Cart) that can align the arm precisely with any row or column (called Rank and File in the chess world) on the chessboard."

Guitar Hero is very popular these days but like any piece of equipment that gets tons of use it will break or wear out. The basic warranty is only 90 days so fixing it yourself will become necessary in many situations. Have a look at the Guitar Hero DIY Repair Guides from the guys at 5FRETS for some great tips.

"Unfortunately, the Guitar Hero World Tour guitar has notoriously unreliable and failure-prone strumbar switches – sometimes failing right out of box! I bought mine during the October 2008 midnight release and it lasted about 4 months before it started doublestrumming on its own. At first I noticed the menu jumping two songs when I only clicked one, and shortly afterwards it ruined my gameplay."

Droky sent in a great DIY Game of Life Build that uses a PIC 12F683. There are lots of details and he also provides the board layout and the PIC code so you could make your own. The capacitive sensors are a nice touch, the board also looks very well done!
Here is the English Google translated version.

"As it did not have enough memory on the PIC, I broke the screen with a grid and thus convert the 84×48 array of pixels in a 25×17 matrix (405 cells) that I do fit in the RAM of the PIC. The next problem was to calculate the next generation, and he needed two RAM arrays, one for the incoming generation and one for output. I’ve solved by calculating the next generation line by line and using a LIFO stack of type 2 levels on 2 variables of type vector."

Game of life from Droky on Vimeo.