Handy board plays music with an NES controller
posted Jun 28th 2011 12:20pm by Brian Benchofffiled under: Microcontrollers
[Alex Busman] has been working with an old microcontroller board called the Handy Board. Recently, he figured out how to interface an NES controller to play music. With 8 buttons on an NES controller, [Alex] has control over an entire musical scale, so he demonstrates this in his video by covering the Dr. Mario Theme.
The Handy Board is a microcontroller board originally designed in 1995 for LEGO robots. With a 68HC11 μC running at 2MHz and 32KB of RAM, the Handy Board has been superseded by the LEGO Mindstorms NTX NXT, the Handy Board is thankfully still being supported, and is still a great platform to learn embedded design.
It’s great to see a build on relatively obsolete hardware, especially considering this would be a trivial build with an Arduino. We think it’s great [Alex] is learning the ins and outs of ‘difficult’ hardware – it’s a great way to learn something. Check out the walk though of [Alex]‘s build after the break.
I learned to program on the Handy Board. It is nice to see one again!