RoboTouch: an NES controller used to play games on an iPad

By George Wong on 03/15/2011, filed in Home > Apple

Ever seen a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller used to play games on an iPad? Probably not. Well the folks over at ProtoDojo have come up with one of the strangest iPad gaming controllers ever. Called the RoboTouch, it makes use of an NES controller, plugged into an Arduino board, connected to a set of arms attached to servo motors that are placed on the iPad’s screen. They’ve managed to make touchscreen games playable with an analog device. Ingenious? You bet. Though it’s going to be troublesome shifting the robot arms around each time you decide to play a different game. Check out the video of the controller used to play Reckless Racing after the break:

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

iPad: the iPad is Apple's tablet computer. While not "invented" by Apple (the newton was arguably a PDA), the iPad has re-ignited the tablet format as it appeared at the right time, with the right hardware and apps. the first iPad was launched on April 2010. It was followed by the iPad 2 in March 2011 and a new iPad (gen 3) in 2012.

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