Ben and Karen revisit retro gaming tech with one of the first wearable controllers, Mattel's Nintendo Power Glove. This repetitive-strain inducing NES gamepad needs to be updated -- time to hack the op amps and custom micro-controller with an osci...
Ben Heck’s NES Power Glove teardown
Ben and Karen revisit retro gaming tech with one of the first wearable controllers, Mattel's Nintendo Power Glove. This repetitive-strain inducing NES gamepad needs to be updated -- time to hack the op amps and custom micro-controller with an osci...
With a bit of laser cutting for the box and some 3D printing for the pieces, cogs and arms, Ben, Karen and Felix build a new version of the board game Jumanji. (Yes indeed, it's on based on the 1995 Robin Williams film.) Also in this episode, Kare...
Ben hacks the Christmas Present Protection System project and puts it to better daily use for pill medication monitoring -- that way you'll know if you've forgotten to take your meds. Using hardware found in the Salvage Wars, along with the brains...
Ben completes the Portable Atari 2600 while wrestling with the trials of laser cutting and 3D printing. Why won't everything fit just right? Ah well, nothing a bit of soldering can't fix! Felix updates us on a side project he's working on from the...
Ben is breaking warranties again this week as he hacks apart an ultraviolet germ sanitizer to make an auto-sanitizing doorknob. The Ben Heck Show team even goes so far as to compare samples of bacterial growth to see how effective the knob is at...
Finally it's time for the team to decide who is the ultimate master of salvage. Ben, Karen and Felix fight it out to discover just how thrifty they can be in recovering motors, sensors and controllers from hardware you can find at your local thrif...
Welcome back for part two of the Nipkow Disc Mechanical Television build! We have the motors and vinyl set up, and now it's time for the electronics and light box. Felix gets to grips with Linux and checks the duty cycles with an oscilloscope and...
Your valuable belongings getting damaged? Ben Heck the Luggage Detective is on the case. Using an NXP accelerometer and motion sensors, Ben produces a logging device that can fit inside your baggage to see just how mistreated your belongings get...
This week, Karen and Ben produce a portable, plug-and-play hardware development kit enclosure, suitable for diagnosing problems on the go and swapping over between kits. Using the BeagleBone Black, a modified Motorola Atrix phone dock and various...
Before LCD monitors, we had good-old fashioned cathode ray tube monitors and televisions. In an homage to that simpler time, Ben and Karen are going back to basics with a two-part project: a mechanical television. To pull it off, the duo used a tr...