Retroball or Super Pong Table Grows Up

pong-table

Retroball is, as its Kickstarter campaign says, "Retro Fun for up to Four Players." What you might not know, is that it's ancestor was featured here earlier last year. With a year and a half of development underway, the build looks spectacular, and the people in their promo video look like they're having lots of fun (obviously). The whole concept of the game is that it has up to four players … [Read more...]

Variable frequency laser using shaken ball bearings

laser

Lasers normally emit only one color, or frequency of light. This is true for laser pointers or the laser diodes in a DVD player. [Kevin] caught wind of state-of-the-art research into making variable wavelength lasers using shaken grains of metal and decided to build his own. When [Kevin] read a NewScientist blog post on building variable frequency lasers built with shaken metallic grains, he … [Read more...]

Using an undocumented display with an FPGA

display

When [Mike] ran across a display on Deal Extreme with 8 seven-segment displays, 8 red/green LEDs, and 8 buttons, he knew it would find a good home in a future project. There was only one problem, though: except for an Arduino library, there was absolutely no documentation available for this display. Wanting to use this display with an FPGA board, [Mike] decided against bit-banging a protocol and … [Read more...]

Popinator fires popcorn into your mouth, is probably a PR stunt

Popcorn Indiana, the same company that manufactures the bags of kettle corn you might find in a convenience store, posted a project on their website called The Popinator. It's a device you fill with popcorn, turn on, and responds to the word, 'pop' by firing a piece of popcorn into your mouth. Details on this build are scant, most likely because The Popinator doesn't operate exactly as … [Read more...]

Turning video game sprites into 3D objects

mario

Anyone who has played Minecraftfor a good amount of time should have a good grasp on making 3D objects by placing voxels block by block. A giant voxel art dragon behind your base is cool, but what about the math behind your block based artwork? [mikolalysenko] put together a tutorial for making 3D objects out of video game sprites and covers a lot of the math involved in turning pixels into … [Read more...]