Here’s a project that will leave you scratching your head! Ever wonder what it would be like to play Pong using those big heavy duty shop crane controllers? No? We haven’t either, but that didn’t stop [hwhardsoft] from trying it anyway!
Now to be fair, they actually built it for the company that manufacturers them — guess it might be a fun game for in the lobby? The project has a Raspberry Pi 2 at the heart with a Pong game written in Python. The fun part was connecting the controllers.
Each controller is wireless with a separate control box, so they were able to modify the control box to avoid making any changes to the actual controller. But since they wanted to use the joysticks, they still had to use an additional ATMEG328 microcontroller to perform the analog to digital conversion for the Pi — it wasn’t exactly plug and play.
All in all the system looks like it works pretty well, and it would be a pretty cute feature for any lobby / sales office!
Our favorite pong game has to be this one though — it just makes so much sense!
Now they need to make… VirtuaCrane
Now hook them up to two real cranes lifting huge pylons with a third controlling a “ball” between the two. Ok, it’d be in slow motion comparatively speaking, but it’d certainly show off the physical capabilities of the cranes themselves.
What happens when they decide to play pong but it’s still hooked up to a crane? I expect an answer in the form of a video
Maybe that’s what happened in Mecca the other day.