And by the big leagues, we mean a bigger-than-life Guitar Hero-esque game being played on a massive megatron wall sized screen. The Kasabian football players kick the soccer ball at their colored square as the Arduino-controlled contact sensors are illuminated by falling colored blocks.
The resulting game is both severely awesome and ridonkulous. Check out the video after the jump.
Only furries could create something so ridiculously mundane that it completely circles around lameness and cycles back to being totally awesome again. This RFID-enabled Arduino-driven tail apparently reacts to different mood chips, wagging if your happy or excited, so on and so forth.
The tail is also controllable with the Wii Nunchuk remote. If your dressing up as a possum for Halloween, this tail could be an invaluable addition to your costume.
So, you’ve been looking for a way to test your hand-eye coordination and space travel skills that doesn’t require staring at a screen or actually traveling into space. The ATMEL AVR microcontroller and Arduino-based Lunar Landing Game allows for an entertaining experience that doesn’t require any digital visuals.
The concept of the game appears to be something along the lines of bringing a video game experience to the real world. Your quest is to successfully land the lunar module. But first you actually have to create the game, which is surely just as fun. Check out a video preview of the game after the jump.
Every office has those moments where nobody knows WTF is going on. At least this office has taken the important step of acknowledging the problem.
The WTF Counter system consists of a button hooked up to an Arduino. Whenever an awkward moment arises, an employee presses the aptly labeled WTF button which is connected to the Arduino. The Arduino logs the WTF moment on a local web server.
What’s a programmer to do. Buy a hard-to-find LED strip? Most likely. He’ll then probably spend weeks hacking it so he can interface it with an Arduino. Afterwards, the LEDs will fade in and fade out for weeks to come, as our hero desperately tries to make sense of all this. After meeting with a friend, our hero and his companion work together to release a library for said LED strip. The day ends and they both breathe a sigh of relief. They hack to live, they live to hack. Hit the link to see it in action.
While I like to do Afternoon Linkage every day, sometimes I just don’t get enough time to take care of it. For this, I am sorry my faithful readers. I’m now going to jump into a vat of lava. Hot lava, that is.
Have great links you want showcased on Afternoon Linkage? E-mail us: tips AT gearfuse DOT com.
The Arduino makes a fierce return, this time in the form of a hat. Using flex sensors and a hat-mounted Arduino, Instructables user RonanOD created a game of Pong where you use your eyebrows for play. The hat senses how much pressure is being created along the brim and uses the related data as input in the game. Instructions are available, but I can’t promise it’ll be fun twitching your eyebrows like Mr. Bean all day long.
Using an Arduino, hacker knowledge and a Nike+ iPod Serial to USB adapter, Nathan Seidle was able to rig up a system that constantly checks for his keyfob. When Nate gets close enough to his car, it opens up. When he walks away, it locks. The system worked flawlessly until he realized that while at work, the car would randomly lock and unlock due to his pacing around the office. The fix? Aluminum foil. A classic solution to blocking radio waves. If you want to make your own, instructions are available.
Any DIYer worthy of the title should know about Lady Ada aka Limor Fried. She’s the ultimate maker and when I ran into her last week at a Gawker party, she brought along an Arduino-based robot she was working on. Needless to say, such a technophile needs an appropriate business card to match. Limor’s feature pop-out Spirograph shapes that you can use to create fun ’80s designs.
Badass? Far from it. Mind-blowing? Absolutely.
Party on, Wayne! Look, if you don’t have an Arduino by now, I have no idea what’s wrong with you. Grab one and then plunk down some cash for this Piezo Drum Kit from Spikenzie Labs. It’s a mere $18.95 and will allow you to easily hook up piezoelectronic sensors to your board and start drumming with any tangible surface area. Your desk? Drum kit. Your 8-month-old child? Drum kit. That bag of cocaine you picked up in the alleyway last night? Drum kit! The possibilities are endless, as long as you don’t suck at percussion.
