LIVESTRONG 2008: The Lance Armstrong Foundation needs your help!
Jun0
Hi Friends!
The Lance Armstrong LIVESTRONG Challenge ride is on June 29th, 2008 and we need your help! Currently, there are nearly 12 million people in the US that are living with cancer. More than 1.3 million people will be diagnosed this year, and over 1,500 lives will be claimed in the next few days. This year, I’ll be participating in the 100-mile LIVESTRONG Challenge ride.
The LIVESTRONG Challenge is hosted by the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) and was founded in 1997 by the champion cyclist. The LAF unites people through programs and experiences to empower cancer survivors to live life on their own terms and to raise awareness and funds for the fight against cancer. The LAF relies on your generous donations to give cancer survivors hope and support.
• $10 provides information packets to 16 cancer survivors to offer support, inspiration and hope.
• $50 provides 36 people cancer survivorship information, worksheets to organize their fight against cancer and support, inspiration and hope from other cancer survivors.
• $155 provides a cancer survivor one-on-one direct support through the LIVESTRONG SurvivorCare program.
• $250 provides LIVESTRONG Survivorship Notebooks to 27 cancer survivors.
I’m asking for your collective help to raise the minimum of $250 to ride and to hopefully meet my fund raising goal of $500. All donations, regardless of the amount, are welcomed. If you wish to donate, please visit the following website for details. You can make a secure donation online, or print out a form for donations in the form of personal checks. You may also contact me directly. If you decide to donate, please do so before June 25th.
Donation Website: http://portland08.livestrong.org/thomasng82
If you are interested in participating in the LIVESTRONG cycling challenge (10, 40, 70 or 100 miles) or the LIVESTRONG 5K run, then I encourage you to find out more at the LIVESTRONG challenge website:
Event website: http://www.livestrongchallenge.org/site/c.frKPI1PAIoE/b.3935399/
I thank you in advance for your time and generosity in giving to the LIVESTRONG Challenge. I’ll keep you updated on my fund raising as I prepare for the event!
Regards,
-Thomas
PS3: Guitar Hero III and Rock Band Controllers incompatible; my project to resolve issue.
May0
To the dismay of many PS3 owners, the Guitar Hero III and Rock Band guitar controllers are incompatible with each other. You can read more about that here, here, and here. There is a patch available, but Sony can’t release it because the makers of GHIII and RB can’t come to an agreement. You can buy a secondary controller for each game, but that is a costly solution. There are other alternatives with third party controllers as well, but they feel cheap and its just not the same.
Well, this got me thinking. Why not just “spoof” the guitar controller and make the PS3 think the GHIII guitar is a RB guitar (and vice versa)? If you plug the GHIII or RB guitars into your PC, they are recognized as game controllers because they implement the standard USB HID (Human Interface Device). For a quick USB overview, you can check out beyondlogic’s “USB in a nutshell” for more information.
Time to put my Computer Engineering and Computer Science education to work.
My plan is to plug the guitar into a micro controller that emulates a USB host, which modifies the USB Vendor ID and Device ID (and remaps keys if necessary), then pass the modified data out a USB slave port that is connected to the PS3. Essentially, the cabling will be something like this:
RB Guitar –> RB Dongle USB –> Microcontroller ((spoof Vendor ID, Device ID, remap keys)) –> PS3
To make this simpler, I’m intending to use the Atmel ATMega128 and the AVR-USB (a firmware only USB driver for AVR microcontrollers). I’ll be using the USB HIDtool to determine the capabilities of each guitar HID and try to emulate them.
Step 1 will be to get my ATmega128 board working. We used this microcontroller in college and in our current designs at work for low-level control so i’m pretty familiar with the ins-and-outs of it.
I’ll update you on the progress… stay tuned for further posts!
We Reached The Beach!
May0
We’re done! All seven of us completed Reach the Beach 2008!
Left to Right: Connie Chong, John Kim, Simon Bee, Thomas Ng, Angela Bee, Susanna Bee, John Munson
Trip distance: 100 miles
Trip time: 6hours 47 minutes