Pokemon Go Physical Pokeball Catches ‘Em All

There’s something irresistible about throwing Pokeballs at unexpectedly appearing creatures. But wait. When did you actually, physically throw a Pokeball? Swiping over colored pixels wasn’t enough for [Trey Keown], so he built a real, throwable, Pokemon-catching Pokeball for Pokemon Go.

For his build, [Trey] acquired an off-the-shelf foam Pokeball, from which he removed the original “light and sound” guts and some of the foam filling to make space for actual, real Pokemon a TI SensorTag 2.0. This little, self-contained IoT development board comes with BLE and an accelerometer, so on the hardware side, there wasn’t much more to do than stuffing it into the prepped foam ball.

[Trey] went on to write an iOS app that accesses the accelerometer data from his Pokeball. If the acceleration values surpass a certain threshold, his app writes a trigger command to a file that he set up to be regularly polled by a user input emulation macro app named AutoTouch. AutoTouch emulates the swipe that throws the Pokeball in the game.

Even if it was just translucent CGI, it might actually have been a real bummer for some fans, that Pokemon Go was released without any sort of physical Pokeballs after they had such a prominent role in the game’s trailer. A missed merchandise opportunity for Nintendo and Niantic, or one yet to come? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the video, where [Trey] demonstrates his build:

Filed under: iphone hacks, nintendo hacks

from iphone hacks – Hackaday

Ever Buy Music From Apple? Use Linux? You Need This Tool

Sure, you’re a hardcore superuser, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the finer things in life — like shiny squircles and getting every new app first. But, what’s an OS-indiscriminate person like yourself going to do when it comes time to purchase music? That’s where the recover_itunes tool shines, and if you’re a Linux user with an iPhone, it might just be your new best friend.

iPhones and other Apple products work great when you’ve purchased music from iTunes, but can be a headache when your music comes from other sources. On the other hand, music purchased from iTunes is notoriously difficult to listen to on anything other than an Apple product. One major reason for the difficulty with the latter is in the way that iTunes handles metadata.

By some miracle of chance, or sheer will, our music libraries — and all of the programs we use to listen to them — have mostly stuck to a standard of saving metadata in the music file itself; metadata for important things like the artist, album, and song title. Unfortunately “mostly” doesn’t include Apple. Apple uses a separate file that contains all of that information.

So, knowing all of that, what happens when you copy your iTunes library to your Linux PC? You’ll be left with files containing no useful information. All you’ll be able to do is play Russian roulette with the shuffle button, like it’s the ’90s and you’ve pushed Random on your Discman. Except now you’ve got 5,000 songs to skip through to find “MMMBop” instead of just the 21 on the CD (seriously, check it out, there are 8 silent tracks on that CD. Why not just use one long silent track?)

The recover_itunes program, created by [kleute], solves this problem, with virtually no effort on the user’s part. Point it towards your music directory and it’ll search for iTunes metadata to match any M4A files, saving copies of the files with the metadata inserted. As a bonus, it’ll even try to find the matching album artwork, which should look great on the HTPC you’ve been meaning to build.

[thanks to Peter]

Filed under: iphone hacks, linux hacks, musical hacks

from iphone hacks – Hackaday

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