Viktor sent in a great tutorial on How to Fix a Worn out Video Game Controller. Most remote controls use rubber membranes that have conductive end that press against the circuit board when pushed. The circuit board has some gold fingers that get shorted out to register the button press. Viktor uses some metal foil on the rubber membrane to bring the controller back to life. This trick should work fine for devices like your XBOX, Playstation, Wii and  TV remotes.

Have you ever been to carnivals and played Duck Hunt Game? Check out the video of this Laser Shooting Duck Hunt Game which shows how this game has evolved using Laser technology. It was carried out by few students from San Jose State University and made the use of laser guns for shooting the eye-catching ducks made up of glass which is makes this game more fascinating to play. Mike Szczys from Hack a Day described the process briefly so that you can blend the strategy in some of your projects too.

Via: Hack a Day

 Look on this crazy digital Foosball Table connected over Internet. You can do lot of amazing things, once you’ll be able to get this tble online. There are number of salient features of it like:

- The Blueprint

- The Mobile WebApp

- The Agency Foosball league

You’ll require a very few components to build your own Foosball Table like – Arduino Uno, WiFly Shield, Stackable Header Kit and Zeitschalter mit IR-Lichtschranken. You can collect all the design steps of this interesting project here.                                                             

 Checkout for more details at Github and Wiki and watch this documentary below:

Remember the game Breakout? These days with game controls like the Kinect who wants to use the old style joysticks anymore?  ECE 5760 students Meng-Ling (Maxwell) Liu, Thu-Thao Nguyen and Yang Yang designed a game that they call HAND BREAKING BRICKS. They are using an FPGA to display the game on the monitor while it is also monitoring a Terasic CCD module which allows the game to “see” the location of the players hand. The players hand location directly reflects to the location of the ball bouncing bar.

Read more about HAND BREAKING BRICKS here.

“In order control the game using hand motions, we need a device to track hand movement. We chose the Terasic CCD kit, which consists of a 1.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor and an IDE cable to connect to the GPIO port of the DE2 board. We followed the provided code to learn how to use the camera in the kit.
The current image is captured by the camera and sent to the DE2 board, then each video frame is stored in the SDRAM. We detected the hand position in the recorded frame using the skin color detection scheme in the top module.”

Remember the geeky computer aquariums we featured about 5 years ago? Instead of using a computer case this XBOX 360 Aquarium uses a gaming console case. Thankfully the donor XBOX was a not working, if you think the window cut looks great that is because it was cut out using a waterjet.

“The tank itself is made of glass, and is approximately 6″ long, 8″ tall, and 2.5″ wide.  Water volume inside the tank is 0.45 gallons.  The tank is lit with a color-changing (RGB) LED strip.  Lighting color and intensity is controlled with a wireless remote.”

If you have taken some CS courses you have no doubt seen Conway’s Game of Life, if you are a kit builder you have probably seen some nice Conway’s Game of Life kits also. Where the basic kit version has 16 elements Cornell University student Cooper Bills wanted to design a system that had 307,200 elements. What this boils down to is an incredible looking visual effect that requires a massive amount of calculations. Luckily this project was undertaken in the Cornell University Advanced Microcontrollers course (ECE5760) where students had the choice of Altera/Terasic DE2 or DE2-115  FPGA educational boards to work with.

Read more about this FPGA Conway’s Game of Life project.

“The main goal of this project was to implement Conway’s game of life on a grid of 640×480 cells, running at 60Hz. Updating that resolution at that rate requires over 18 million updates per second! This leaves just a few clock cycles per cell for updating. Given that each cell requires 9 values to calculate it’s next value, even with extreme pipelining serial updating would not be possible (without over-clocking).”

This vintage video game player has a few extras on it. The extra knobs buttons and switches allow you to play this game console in a new way. With the original circuit board connected to in certain audio circuit location you are able to alter it in a pleasing way, watch the video below to see an example of this in action.

Thanks to John who passed along this link using out tips page.

“If you ever wondered what happens after you install the GetLoFi LTC1799 Precision Oscillator in the original 8 bit Nintendo then here is your answer. The sounds can be slowed down and sped up nicely at a twist of a knob, and when paired up with some glitches it really makes for a crazy noise making instrument.”