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Play 'Angry Birds' with a USB slingshot controller

Play 'Angry Birds' with a USB slingshot controller

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A new hack lets you play Angry Birds with a USB slingshot — once you build it yourself, that is.

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USB Slingshot
USB Slingshot

While Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 700 million times and spawned countless parodies, someone has managed to add a new wrinkle to the bird-slinging action by building a USB slingshot controller. Created by Simon Ford, director of tools for mbed parent company ARM, it uses an accelerometer to measure the tilt of the controller and a "rubber stretch sensor" to measure how hard you pull back, and then maps those movements to the appropriate mouse controls. There's also a USB connector and an mbed NXP LPC11U24 Microcontroller, and all of the electronics are embedded into a plain old slingshot carved from a branch. You can find all of the details on how to build one yourself — including the code for mapping the controls — in the source link below, but you should probably hurry if you want your own in time for the launch of Angry Birds Space.