For this Cornell ECE 5760 Hand Tracking Pong project Hanting Lu and Kedari Elety have connected a camera to an FPGA, the image is down sampled so that it is only looking at a 40 X 30 image to determine how the players are moving.

“The NTSC video signal from the camera is stored in the SDRAM at the rate of the TV Decoder Line clock (TD_CLK). Data is read from the SDRAM each time the VGA requests data. The data from the SDRAM is in YUV format which needs to be converted to RGB before sending it to the VGA. For skin detection, we added a filter at this converting module level such that in addition to the R,G and B values, the module also outputs a one bit binary 1 if it corresponds to a skin pixel. Else, zero. By doing this, the output on the VGA is now white corresponding to skin pixels and black otherwise.”

Thanks to lyberty5 for sending in his audio headset built from a SuperNES controller.

“The controller was used as a base, I then rebuilt walls with bits of plastic and epoxy resin. I then used epoxy putty to model a circular shape, some bondo, and a lot of sanding. The whole thing was then painted. It’s not perfect and I’ve damaged the paint in some places. Also the controller itself had nicks and holes in the part I didn’t paint over, due to
its years of gaming.”

This Digital Reversi Board Project by Hanting Lu and Kai Wang from Cornell University look like fun. It is just like the real reversi game and ensures that players can’t make invalid moves. An Atmel Mega 1284 is used to read in the press locations from the touch sensor and is also interfaced to the bi-color LEDs using a TI 3 to 8 line decoder chip and a ton of physical pins on the microcontroller.

“For our final project in ECE 4760, we designed and implemented a Reversi board consisting of hardware, a microcontroller, and a touch screen. Sixty-four bicolor (red and green) LEDs were implemented as the black and white pieces of the game. Players could simply light up a LED (place a piece) by touching the touch screen in the position right above the corresponding LED. Other LEDs would be flipped automatically according to the rules of Reversi, which is programmed into the microcontroller.”

Travis Breen sent in his latest hack where he shrunk a Nintendo 64 into a Handheld Console. To see the build pictures go to 3:00 point in the video. As you can see by the pictures getting it all to fit wasn’t an easy task. The case also looks to be a labour of love, t turned out nice enough to be at home on a store shelf.

“Uses a full size N64 board with the cartridge slot relocated. 2 lithium ion batteries give you about 2-3 hours of play time, depending on the game played/brightness level. 7 inch widescreen, stereo speakers, original N64 controller buttons, and expansion pack. The case was made from a sheet of ABS plastic. Used bondo to get the smooth shape; the white paint is an automotive paint from Toyota(super white 040). Can be played from the internal batteries, or from wall power.”

Dan sent in a cool Automated Dartboard Score Monitoring project that he just completed. It is based around a dartboard that already has a ton of smarts built into it. The cheap ($15) dartboard has built in sensors that can detect what score area was hit and keeps track of the score on a built in LCD screen. How can this system be made better? Well you could install a high performance CPU and transmit the scores to an Android phone! I had never heard of the Coridium BASIC Chip but it looks like a fast, powerful device for $10. The sensor wires were connected to inputs on the Coridium chip and the resulting hit locations are sent via a Bluetooth module to an Android device running custom code. If you want to play around with the code to see how it works you can download it from the link at the bottom of the project page.

Martin Raynsford has been working hard on his 365 thing blog and has just completed this Mechanical Donkey Kong game. It looks like a lot of fun and looks to be a great platform to build on.

“Two servos handle the motion of Mario. One turns mario left and right and the other controls the jump. An arduino reads input from the NES and decides what to do with the servos. Left and right are mapped directly from the pad and the jump mechanism goes up when the ‘A’ button is pushed and 0.5 seconds later Mario is lowered again. This gives it lots of time to jump cleanly over the barrels.”

I played a ton of Apple games in junior high, I think Choplifter was my favorite, looks like Taipan was created around the same time but unfortunately I don’t think my school had it. Simon Jansen sent in this hack where he made a version of the Taipan game that runs on 2 Adruino boards. Two Arduinos (that talk to each other) were used because a single Arduino would not have the power to run the game. As you can imagine this game requires a ton of strings to be displayed on the screen and text chews up memory space in a hurry. Because of this there is a lookup table that is used to index strings that are being stored on an external EEPROM. The game display is a small backup camera and looks right at home in the 1st edition of the Taipan book that was used as the game case.

If you are interested in making your own Simon has provided the source code on this page.

“Gameplay is exactly like the original Apple 2 version, right down to the ‘bugs’. I did need to rearrange the screens somewhat due to a smaller resolution than the original version but all the information is present and all the strings are exactly as in the original (with the exception of minor changes).

The whole game is contained inside a housing made from a hard cover copy of the original Tai-Pan book (first edition too)! It contains 8 AA Ni-MH cells to power both the screen and the Arduinos. A recharging socket is included on the main panel.”