[Pete Mills] was browsing around online when he came across an arcade button light switch and immediately wanted one. He didn’t however want to pay the $35 asking price for the switch, so he decided to build it himself.

He says that his solitary arcade machine doesn’t warrant its own room, so he figured he would wire the switch up to an extension cord in his workshop instead. The switch was made with parts he had on hand, so seeing as he didn’t have any triacs, he opted to use a relay in its place. He thought about how he would construct a simple flip flop circuit for the switch, and settled on using a simple 555-based circuit instead of a pair of transistors.

The end result looks every bit as nice as the version available for sale online, and it works great as you can see in the video below. [Pete] has circuit schematics available on his site should you want to build your own, so if you do, let us know in the comments – we’d love to see different variations on the circuit design.

[Johan Larsby] built this pretty cool Monome clone. He was starting with a kit to build an Arduinome, but had issues getting his LED matrix to work correctly. After digging around in some old parts and hacking together some custom LED arcade buttons, he ended up with the Moanonme.  Be sure to check out the video after the break.

[via Create Digital Music]