Link to Pacman 3000!

Edit: Media Hogs Studios has closed. Thank you all. I'm still deciding what the future holds for Pacman 3000. Stay tuned.

Again, still recovering so no progress on any of the builds, though I am going to plug a video game that I made in grade 9 for a business trade show project. It's called Pacman 3000, and you play as Pacman, running around a fully 3D world trying to eat coins while avoiding ghosts. Try it out!

Since grade 9 I've added a high score system, and plan to add more features and maps, as well.

Without further ado, here is the game!
http://mediahogsstudios.com/games/pacman3000/


With the exception of that page, the website on the whole is rather unfinished. I haven't had time to work on it much.


Also hello HackTheNorth people :)

Quick Update

So my Wisdom Teeth surgury went very well, I could even say it was a good experience! They had me on IV sedation which basically made me feel really sleepy and relaxed through the whole thing. What felt like 5 minutes was actually an hour and a half, and eight needles! I'm still swollen and my teeth hurt a bit but not as much as I originally expected.

In the mean time I've been working on small projects. I built and painted two plastic models, and today I built the hovercraft kit you see in the picture. I've had it for a long time and never got around to building it.

The assembly was obviously easy, but when I turned it on, the thing barely moved, with the back end scraping on the ground. The 4 fresh AAA batteries I had installed just didnt provide enough power.
Solution? Stick a 9V in there. Man did it fly, even over carpet which suprised me for a kit of this type.

As you could imagine though, the motor with the AAA's demanded a lot of current, and with the 9V, it sucks it like no tomorrow. Between the low resistance of the motor and the gradually increasing heat of all components, I'd say you could run this thing for 10, maybe 15 minutes before it would not have enough power. And 9V batterys are expensive!

That's all for today. Ill get back into my other projects soon.

Posting Break

Im getting my Wisdom Teeth removed today.... And I'm not sure sure what state I will be in and probably won't be able to do much work on any projects for a day or two. So stay tuned :D

Some Coding Stuff

Just a quick post to plug my GitHub profile... I have two repos, one models the Infinite Monkey Theorum (where a monkey typing away into infinity will eventually produce a well known literary text), and another one that I'm currently working on, a resistor color calculator. I'm mostly learning the basics of GUI in Java with this one... the programming of the back end isnt too hard, but I'm struggling with GUI, mostly because I've never done it before.

Anyway, here it is! GitHub Link

First Stages of Nerf build

The first thing I decided to do was to create an in-gun flashlight and laser sight. I would place 3 white LEDs and a modified dollar store laser into the front panel of the gun, where there was just enough clearance for them. It is a pretty tight spot to work in but I managed to make it work. I drilled the holes and they all fit perfectly. Next, I soldered the LEDs together in parallel and then to a wire. The dollar store laser was a little difficult to extract.... To get to the PCB I had to literally destroy the thin metal case for it. After unsoldering the battery spring and pushbutton and soldering positive and negative leads to it I installed both the laser and the LED.

I'm far from done... The is still the power supply system as well as the power switches for both the laser and the flashlight. Not to mention I still have to design and make the ammo capacity display. But in the pictures attached you will find my progress so far.

DVD Player Fun

I finished dismantling a broken DVD player. My main goal for most of my (one way) dismantals is usually to salvage as many parts as possible, but today I was after the laser diode in particular. With some effort I was able to safely extract it, as well as about 20+ components. I still need to test out the diode, as I've never hooked one up before.

I also played around with using the lenses in the laser reader module as Macro lenses for my cell phone camera, and it worked really well. As you can see in the photos, I took a picture of the laser diode. The true size of that is quite a bit smaller than my pinky fingernail. In another picture you see Her Majesty The Queen's eye on the front of a Canadian $20 bill.

I haven't forgotten about my RoboQuad project by the way. More on that to come soon!

Today in DIY

I did a lot today... Er... Yesterday... Its 12:40am...

I finished painting the controller, adding some red accents to the top. I'm terrible at acrylic hand painting as you can see but I think for a first effort ever it's not too bad. Maybe someday I will come back to it and make it better.

I also completed my first Nerf Gun mod. I recently got a Nerf disk blaster pistol, and today I increased the tension in the spring, causing the disks to fly faster, further and straighter. After I was done that I made a little device that would use the momentum of the disks to essentially launch ping pong balls from the gun (the gun would fire the disk as usual into a pingpong ball resting on the stand in front of it). I literally made it out of the first 3 things I saw laying around; duct tape, a plastic tape roll and a dental floss box.
Yes, a dental floss box.
Maybe Ill add some more mods to that gun... I'm thinking lights, and an LED display to show how many disks are left in the Magazine! I'll draw that up and post it sometime :)

Painting

Today after realising I had spray paint, I decided to customize my Datel XBox 360 controller. Another thrift store score ($5), this controller is a rapid fire trigger controller. This means you can set how many times the trigger button actives per second while you hold it down.

How useful! Though too bad I don't have an XBox and it doesn't connect to my PC, which was the real reason I bought it.

Anyway, because its relatively easy to disassemble and reassemble and I don't really mind if I mess it up, I decided to paint it. I have never painted anything before so it is definitely a learning experience.

The color scheme I wanted just so happened to be the paint colors I had around, which for now is a simple gunmetal body with reflective(ish) silver triggers and buttons. The body is solid gray for now but ill leave it as another exercise to hand paint on it later.

It was such a nice day out so I decided to do it outside and ended up eating lunch and writing this post while waiting for the paint to dry.

Ill post a picture when it has finished drying and is back together. But for now here are some things I did wrong!
- I Sanded too hard. There are some pretty bad scrapes I thought the paint would fill, but didn't.
- I didn't tape off the sides of the button holes. These will have to be sanded later so the buttons can fit and move freely.

But its all a learning experience like I said!

Initial Roboquad Research

So after researching a bit, I found the easiest way to interface an Arduino is to issue it commands through infrared, similar to how the remote works. With a carrier frequency of about 39.5kHz, you would send a 12 bit signal (with 1200 bits per second) through an IR LED to be received by the robot. Alternatively I would imagine you could bypass the infrared all together and hardwire a serial connection between the Arduino and the receiving ports of the CPU. (IE soldering a direct connection from the Serial Out to the negative pole of the LED, I assume. To make sure this works I'll try on some old DVD player or something first just in case I'm wrong and mess something up by accident)

The remote for the Roboquad has 19 buttons, however it has 4 shift levels, Unshifted, Green shift, Yellow Shift, and Red Shift. When a shift mode is active, it will change what each button does. Thus this allows for 72 different operations. (18 keys not including shift, times 4 functions per key)


The structure of the signal works like this:
- A 4 bit prefix denoting the model of the target robot is sent (If you have one remote to distinguish between different Wowwee robots). For the Roboquad its 0110 (0x600 in hex).
- An 8 bit instruction that contains information about what shift is active as well as what key was pressed. For example, the walk forward command is 0x601 (Prefix [0x600] + D-PAD-FORWARD UNSHIFT Instruction [0x001]).
- No end bit, so there needs to be about 500ms between commands.

If I wanted to send a walk forward command through my Arduino, here is what I think I'll have to do:
- Hook an IR LED to serial out
- In setup() use Serial.begin(1200); //to denote the Bits per Second as 1200
- Call Serial.write(0x601); or Serial.write(011000000001); or Serial.write(1537);. Not sure which will work, though all of them are equivalent.

This will be my first test. That is... after I salvage a new IR LED after blowing out my only one a while back :)


A really nice table of the commands (and my source for this information) is available here.

It is 1am and I have to be up again in 5 hours so I'm out for now.

Time Flies + First Modding Project

It certainly hasn't felt like a year and a half since my last post... I was shocked to see "November 2012" at the top of my other posts.

So I went to Goodwill today (thrift store) and managed to pick up a Wowwee Roboquad for $8... a steal when Amazon lists it as $180 new, and >$40 used. What a steal!
There were two there, and I was so glad to see the other one being picked up by this little girl who seemed like the happiest person in the world after finding it :)
Anyway, as I let it walk around my room as I worked on my computer and it ended up exploring the whole room; you could see its footprint trails in the carpet. It was really fun to watch.
I'm going to at some point open it up and attempt to interface my Arduino with it, while being as non-destructive to the original functionality and cosmetics as possible. That is to say I can't cut any wires without soldering them back later for example.

I figure I'll keep a record on this blog if I do end up doing anything!