If you’re just bored to play Angry Birds with the touchscreen of your smartphone or with your mouse in Angry Birds for Chrome, you can now bring the fun back to the game by playing with a real slingshot !
mbed designed a USB slingshot with an mbed NXP LPC11U24 (Cortex-M0 MCU) board that emulates a USB mouse.
mbed measures the angle and strength applied with:
- An accelerometer that measure the tilt by tracking the gravity vector
- A rubber stretch sensor used as the sling, and measure how much it is stretched.
They built the slingshot with the following hardware components:
- mbed NXP LPC11U24 board – 59 USD
- 3-axis Accelerometer – ADXL345 Accelerometer connect via SPI – 14.95 USD
- Stretch Sensor connected to pin 15 (analog input) – 9.95 USD
- USB B connector
- Handcrafted Slingshot
Here’s how mbed describes their NXP board:
The mbed NXP LPC11U24 MCU module is a tool for rapid prototyping with micro-controllers. This particular board is aimed at prototyping USB device applications such as mouse, keyboard, mass storage, and serial interfaces for designs that are aimed at portable applications running on batteries and any applications that could use the simplicity and performance made available by the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 core. The mbed.org online developer platform with online compiler and developer tools are designed to help engineers in early stages of development, enabling rapid prototyping, iteration, and design space exploration to get proof-of-concepts built fast.
You can watch the MCU-based slingshot in action in the video below:
The MCU source code is written in C and is only about 150 lines long.
You can find further technical details on Mbed Slingshot Page and you can try it yourself if you are at Embedded World 2012, in Nuremberg, Germany.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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