Rapid fire update brings many new features

[Shawn McCombs] has been spending some time refining his Xbox 360 rapid fire hack. This time around he’s got a lot more features, many of which we haven’t really seen before.

When we looked at the original project he had added an ATtiny85 which read a potentiometer to set the rapid fire speed for one of the buttons. This time around he’s opened up settings for individual weapons in the game. For instance, if you have a hand-gun and a rifle, you can set different rapid fire rates for each to account for the reload speed for those guns. He patched into the ring of LEDs on the controller in order to indicate which preset is currently chosen. There are three tactile switches on the underside of the controller too. One of them is a reset button which gets you back to your primary weapon and the default rapid fire rate. Settings for each weapon are saved to the EEPROM so you won’t lose them when the controller goes to sleep. Check out [Shawn's] description of the project in the video after the break.

384-LED ball receives animation wirelessly and knows its orientation

We get a ton of tips about Kickstarter projecWe get a ton of tips about Kickstarter projects. Here is a great example of what we need to see in order to feature one of them. This LED Blinky Ball developed by Null Space Labs is the target of a rather ambitious fundraising campaign. But in addition to the fundraising write-up they’ve shared extensive details about the prototype.

The ball is made up of sixteen slices; each is its own circuit board hosting an LED driver. All slices use the same PCB design, but one of them has an ATmega328 populated on the board to act as master. Optional components on the master board include an accelerometer, and a Bluetooth module to receive animation data. To get the full effect of the most recent prototype you’re going to want to see the video on their Kickstarter page.

Think this ball looks familiar to you? The original design was developed by [Nikolai] as a performance piece for a friend. This version was inspired by our feature of that earlier project.

So, use this as a template if you’re planning to submit your Kickstarter links toHackaday’s tips line. We want to juicy details on the project!s. Here is a great example of what we need to see in order to feature one of them. This LED Blinky Ball developed by Null Space Labs is the target of a rather ambitious fundraising campaign. But in addition to the fundraising write-up they’ve shared extensive details about the prototype.

The ball is made up of sixteen slices; each is its own circuit board hosting an LED driver. All slices use the same PCB design, but one of them has an ATmega328 populated on the board to act as master. Optional components on the master board include an accelerometer, and a Bluetooth module to receive animation data. To get the full effect of the most recent prototype you’re going to want to see the video on their Kickstarter page.

Think this ball looks familiar to you? The original design was developed by [Nikolai] as a performance piece for a friend. This version was inspired by our feature of that earlier project.

So, use this as a template if you’re planning to submit your Kickstarter links to Hackaday’s tips line. We want to juicy details on the project!