Archive for July 2010
I haven't posted this week because I've been on a roadtrip over to Aberystwyth to check out my new flat. The place looks good and I've started unpacking my boxes and making it look a bit more homely. Below you can see a couple of pics of my new room. I have a normal sized bedroom, nothing exciting, but I have a massive cubby hole to store things in. I think the guys want to run a server from in that cupboard which is just as well since the cupboard space itself is not heated. So I move in at the end of August and I'll be looking to find a job as soon as I get over there. Then, its just a matter of time before term starts and my degree continues!
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My friend Martyn is really into the Guitar Hero game series and is pretty good at them. However, he got into the games via a demo and started playing with his traditional XBox controller rather than the guitar. For this reason, he's really good at playing with a standard controller, but can't use a guitar shaped one very well at all. In the last few iterations of the Guitar Hero games, they've stopped you being able to use a joypad to play, instead forcing you into using a guitar shaped control. Martyn wants to play the latest games on his GamePad, so today we started modding a guitar control into the shape of a gamepad.
Upon opening up the case, we found that the circuitry in the controller is actually quite simplistic. There are a lot of complicated ICs for connecting to the XBox itself and transmitting data to and from the system, but the controls are just a series of pressure pads linked to the system in parallel.
The system works by detecting when the guitar has been oplucked (the pluck sensor is on) and figuring out which coloured button in the neck has been pushed. The old system (controller only) relied upon the player simply tapping a single button to play a note. Therefore, the only real electronics I need to do is solder the pluck mechanism to the coloured buttons so that when Martyn pushes one of the buttons, the controller also registers as having been plucked too. This is going to be fairly simple, since I just need to solder connectors to all of the positive terminals on the pressure pads and the ground wires for all of the switches should do the rest.
I drew up a little circuit diagram for the neck and for part of the main system (I'm sure my diagram isn't "standards compliant", its been a long time since I studied electronics) and we went to maplin to pick up a few tools. Next week we're going to put together a prototype using buttons and things bought at maplin. The rest of the photographs can be seen below.
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I've been working on Predtr for weeks now and progress was looking good until the other day I hit a block and two very serious questions occurred to me: 1) What, if anything, will I get out of writing this program? 2) If I do finish PREDTR, is there any evidence that people would want/use it?
Unfortunately, I decided that neither question had desirable answers and have decided to put the project on the back-burner for a bit, while I work on some more useful, profitable projects. My work will almost certainly be open source (you know what I'm like) but I have thought of some ways of making a bit of money from these new projects.
In other news, the lake district trip was a success and I've finally got the car insured meaning I can legally drive once again.
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