The picture above is of a Skull Tattoo pedal adapted to connect to standard switch adapted equipment. This one takes nothing more than the pedal, a 3.5mm mono plug, a knife and a 5g pouch of SUGRU to create. No soldering required. Pop over to OneSwitch.org.uk's DIY guide for step-by-step help.
The costs using SUGRU broke down for me as £8.23 for the Skull pedal and £6.40 for the Acrylic pedal (see below). This was assuming I purchased a £6.50 three pack of 5g SUGRU.
Potentially reducing costs further would be to glue or solder the connections, with the cost going down to £4.98 or £3.15. In SUGRU's favour, the former solution is cleaner and removes the need for soldering.
Next on the agenda, is a DIY solder-less versatile switch and joystick interface for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, which you can glimpse below.
I've been slow in reposting this amazing creation that I first learnt about at The Controller Project site. It enables the user, Steve, to play PS3 games using a head-tracker and a single switch. The later iteration takes the PC screen and mixes it with the PS3 output. Brilliant! One day we'll see this as a standard console/computer option for games.
Teaching Switch Skills Beyond Cause and Effect: Brilliant to see Kate Aherne back blogging. This is one of her more recent invaluable posts.
London South Bank University Enable Gaming event: 31 Aug 2013 10:00-19:00 "Enable Gaming is inviting you to share your dev expertise with London Southbank University (LSBU) students and mentor them as they make one-button games in a day for Lifelites projects in children’s hospices. Enable Gaming is a project between Lifelites and LSBU." Via Siobhan Thomas on IGDA GASIG list.
Vibration developments: ViviTouch HD seeking to bring a wider range of feel to games than just rumbles. Via Sandra Uhling on the IGDA GASIG list.
Hybrid Braille: Thailand Association of The Blind's Storybook [and font] for All Eyes. Via Techni Myoko.
Kinect sensor modified for wheelchair gaming. Hello Microsoft! That would be great for the new Kinect, please.
With the set-up above, two accessibility switches are all that are needed to browse the Playstation 3 menu system. From there you can freely switch between the likes of the BBC iPlayer, Netflix, photo albums, MP3s, the Playstation store, the internet and a range of one and two-switch playable games.
The set-up requires a PS3 connected via a Cronus adapter to a Windows PC, running JoyToKey and Bullseye with special profiles that you can download here. Two switches are connected to a C-SID (Button 1 and Button 2) but any USB connected joystick should work just fine too.
Really excited by some of the games that are now possible to make one or two-switch accessible: Poker Night 2, Pool, Golf, Fighting games, Dance mat games, Driving games, Pinball, sand-box exploration games, maybe point and click adventures and more.
Also pleased to find out that PSone CD based games work on all PS3s, so brilliant one-switch playable titles such as Destruction Derby, Um Jammer Lammy and Fluid are also back on the cards. More to follow...
Brilliant videos from Colin McDonnell, and brilliant implementation of one-switch access so it seems. Looking forward to trying this out myself. Well done Colin and well done Apple! Seems there's a switch gaming revolution brewing (see my next post too).
