LED Strip Pong As An Arduino Shield

led-pong-strip

[Schuyler Sowa] has been hard at work on his own version of LED strip Pong. We’d say his work has really paid off. The game is robust and full of features.

Unlike the original Pong video game LED pong only has one axis on which the ball travels. The ball will bounce back if the button at the end of the strip is pressed when either of the last two LED pixels are illuminated. To add in a difficulty adjustment [Schuyler] included a poteniometer which alters the speed.

The game board is one meter of LED strip with individually addressable pixels. It cost a whopping $28 and was the second kind he tried after having trouble with the WS2801 based version (which often come as strings of lights). An Arduino board controls the game, with a shield made from protoboard to connect the components. In addition to the two user buttons — which were hacked out of a computer keyboard — you’ll notice a pair of seven segment displays acting as a scoreboard and an HD44780 character LCD rounding out the user interface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW_LPh4xO64

5 thoughts on “LED Strip Pong As An Arduino Shield

  1. cool , but i want it to have more dynamic feel. what if I made the “ball” go fast or slow depending on the speed in which i press (or punch) the sensor? similar to real-life ping pong. what sensor would be best to use instead of a simple switch?

    1. Then why would you ever, not press as hard as possible?

      Instead what i think should be done is the longer you dare to wait, the faster the returnspeed should be. So, if you play it safe, your ball will be slow?

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