The xBot

When the going gets tough, the tough build robots. For David Harr, Perfect Dark Zero got tough when it came to the two Achievements awarded for playing 1,000 Deathmatch and DarkOps games. “I’d already played Perfect Dark Zero for 50-plus hours for the other multiplayer Achievements,” says Harr, whose gamertag is Diego Knyte. “I got pretty good at knocking out several of them simultaneously.”

But rather than slog through 2,000 multiplayer games manually, Harr crafted the awesome xBot to do it for him. A mix of TTL logic circuits, solenoids, and Meccano construction-set parts that crouch around a cradle for a 360 controller, the xBot presses Start to begin an online bot match, then hits B to quit out of the game and find another. When the lowest possible frag limits are set up, the xBot can slam through about 40 games an hour and get each Achievement in a little more than a day. Its owner gets to sleep.

Why play more? The xBot will get those Perfect Dark Achievements for you.

Which begs the question: Isn’t building a robot to boost your stats kinda...unfair? “I had no problem making this with regards to cheating,” responds Harr, whose other hobbies and projects can be seen at www.dknyte.com. “In the end, I saw an opportunity to use my skills to perform this particular task at hand. Downloading saved games to knock out 1,000 points through one download and a half-hour of game-time — now that’s cheating."

For our two cents, Harr’s mad-genius powers alone mean those Achievements are richly deserved.

A binary counter triggers the solenoids that push Start and B.

The xBot's rear is a delicate nest of handwired TTL circuits.

Harr says the xBot took about 10 hours to design. Time well spent!

See the Xbot in action, then check out Diego Knyte's website for more interesting experiements...