The sales team in [Chuck’s] office is a pretty competitive bunch as you might expect, and they decided that they wanted a system which would allow them to challenge one another during their weekly meetings. The competition involves answering questions posed by their manager, but hand raising only works for so long – they needed a definitive way to tell who “buzzed in” to answer a question first.

Since [Chuck] only had a short bit of time and a tiny budget to work on, he opted to find the easiest solution to the problem, which was an Arduino-based game show buzzer system. The game display is built from an Arduino, some LEDs and an Altoids tin, while the buzzer pushbuttons were salvaged from an old radio broadcast console.

Now, when a question is posed, the salesman can buzz in to answer, knowing that only the quickest person’s button click will be registered. When it’s time for another question, the host simply clicks his buzzer to reset the console.

While it’s not quite as fancy as this game buzzer system we featured a while back, [Chuck] says it does the job perfectly and was cheap to boot.

Continue reading to see a short video of the office game buzzer system in action.

[Andrzej] loves his Nokia N900, noting that it makes a great portable gaming device. Since it supports a wide array of emulators, it’s perfect for indulging his gaming nostalgia on the go. He says that the one downside to the N900 is that its keyboard doesn’t make gaming easy, nor comfortable.

To make gaming a big more fun, he built himself an add-on gamepad that fits perfectly over the phone’s keyboard. Connected via the phone’s USB port, it features 8 push buttons along with a PSP joystick. He used an ATmega8A as the brains of the controller, communicating with the phone as a USB keyboard. He says that this sort of configuration makes it extremely easy to do all sorts of custom button mapping on a per-game basis.

As you can see in the picture above the controller is currently lacking a case, but we think that with a bit of clever packaging, it could look as nice as a retail add-on.

Check out the short video below to see his gamepad in action.

Want to host a Jeopardy tournament with your friends? Looking to add a bit more fairness to your school’s knowledge bowl? Perhaps you should build some buzz-in hardware of your own.

Here you can see [Matt Hanson's] take on this idea. He used one Arduino to gather not just buzzer info, but also keypad data from four satellite controllers. Each has an RJ45 jack, allowing it to connect tot he base unit with an Ethernet patch cable. We like the color coding that [Matt] chose, which matches the color of the arcade button to the keystone jack on the base. And of course the fantastic look of the water-jet cut cases isn’t lost on us either.

You may wonder why he included a key pad on each controller? It looks like he and a few others worked together to develop a team-based math game for use in school.

[Daniel] just made a motion controlled game controller to go with his infuriating game. Thankfully, [Daniel] posted the source for this game so first time players already know the level select codes.

The controller is based on an Arduino Uno with what looks to be a Sparkfun 2-axis accelerometer providing the tilt sensing. A similarly sourced half-inch force sensitive resistor and temperature sensor control the ‘jump pads’ in the game. A small vibrating pager motor strapped onto the controller as a rumble pack.

The game itself, built with Processing, is maddeningly hard (at least using a PC and a mouse) and fairly addictive. We’re going to keep telling ourselves that the game is hard because we don’t have a good controller. That saves us from taking out some frustrations on our laptop, but it does bring up memories of the MadCatz incident.

Check out the video below for the demo.

[Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space.

The game runs on a small cellphone-type LCD screen. The helicopter remains somewhere in the center column of the screen as the maze that makes up the game board approaches one step at a time. The single button that controls the helicopter will raise it with each step of the maze when held down, or allow it to fall when released. The player’s progress is shown as a hex value in the upper left corner of the screen. When you hit a wall, your score will be shown next to the high score for the game and will be saved in EEPROM if it’s a new record. As the game progresses, the maze gets harder based on the score. Check it out in a video clip after the break.

How long has it been since you’ve played a game of tag?

[Sylvia Cheng, Kibum Kim, and Roel Vertegaal] from Queen’s University’s human media lab have concocted a fun twist on the classic game that just might compel you to start playing again.

Their game, called TagURIt, arms two players with Lumalive LED t-shirts which sport embedded touch sensors. A third player, known as the “chaser” attempts to touch either of the other players in order to capture the token displayed on the player’s chest-based LED matrix. The game is score-based, awarding points to the chaser for capturing tokens, while giving the other players points for avoiding capture.

If both players wearing the LED shirts are near to one another, the token will jump to the other player in an attempt to thwart the chaser. In this game, each player is a location-tagged URI, and proximity is determined by either tracking the users with cameras indoors, or via RF sensors if the game is played outside.

It is definitely an interesting way of playing tag, and we imagine it could be quite fun in large groups.

Continue reading to see a video demonstration of the TagURIt game being played.

[via Adafruit blog]

Back with another interesting vidoe, [Jeri Ellsworth] once again brings us an amusing and educational hack. This time she’s made a “shooting gallery” in the style of the old arcade games that actually used projectiles. In her version however, she’s using LEDs in the targets which are detected by the gun.  In an effort to keep the feel the same, she rigged up a pinball bell to ding at the appropriate times and it is quite effective.

As usual, she does a great job of breaking everything down and explaining how it all works. She shows us around her prototype so you can see how it is constructed, if you can make it through the solder gun shootout in the beginning.  If she were to continue with this project beyond the functional prototype stage, we’d love to see small video clips being displayed for the targets pepper’s ghost style. Maybe we’re just having fond memories of Time Traveler.

[Trav] was pondering virtual reality and decided it was no longer all that it was cracked up to be, so he created an experience in what he calls “Remote Reality”. While we have seen many installations over the years that allow people to remotely interact with objects across the globe, his Orbduino project consists of more than simply toggling lights on and off (though he’ll let you do that too).

In his house, he has set up a robotic playground of sorts that allows anyone who visits a chance to play around with the robotic arm he has installed there. The arm is situated in a pen filled with random objects which can be stacked and moved around. He also promises to show you something fun, provided you can guide the arm to pick up an object and hold it against the target positioned outside the pen.

He didn’t forget the obligatory remote light controls either. You can turn the overhead lights on and off, as well as control a multi-colored orb situated in the corner of the room. Most of the project’s interface is done with an Arduino Mega, which handles the robot arm interface, as well as messing with the light installations.

If you have some free time, swing by his site and give the robotic arm a try. It’s a fun little time waster that you will likely enjoy.  Just make sure to take it easy on his web server!

While handheld breathalyzers are pretty novel to have around while drinking with friends, there’s nothing exciting about a $50 off the shelf unit. If you really want to grab people’s attention, you have to get creative and built something like [Batsly Adams] and his friends did.

One evening, he was casually drinking with some friends and playing around with an electronic alcohol sensor. They quickly put together a NES ROM that would play sounds, changing the pitch depending on how much alcohol the sensor detected. It quickly became apparent to them that a full-fledged breathalyzer video game was in order. In no time, he and his friends had compiled graphics, a soundtrack, and the code to drive their game, DrunkenNES.

To play the game, each player must blow into a gutted NES cartridge that has been fitted with the alcohol sensor. The Nintendo computes the player’s BAC, reporting how intoxicated they are using simple graphics and cheesy animal puns. We don’t know when the code and schematics will be made available, but when they are, you can guarantee we will be building one for “research” purposes to pair with our Power Hour shot glass.

Keep reading to see some in game video of DrunkenNES

[Thanks Adam]

Gameduino is an FPGA based sound and graphics adapter for microcontrollers. Laid out as an Arduino shield, all it really takes is a microcontroller with SPI and some code to send commands to the board which lets you toggle registers, handle memory, and drawing functions.

Once the data gets there, it is greeted by a Xilinx FPGA which puts out a 800×600 72Hz SVGA sync signal, large 512×512 pixel character scrolling backgrounds, piles of 16×16 (up to 256 color) sprites, each with per pixel transparency, rotation, flip, and if that was not enough a 12 bit frequency synth that can do 16 independent voices.

All the resources to make one of these is listed on the site under the Making a Gameduino link, but if youre interested in getting a made board there is also a kickstarter page available. There are other ways to squeeze video out of micro controllers from the basic like hackvision to AVGA or even Lucidscience AVR VGA v2, and tons of propeller projects, but this one being stand alone and portable, has a certain appeal.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

[Thrashbarg] is back up to some 555 timer madness again, this time with his sort of dodge ball video game. Featuring twenty three 555 timers, op amps (the LM324) and atari paddles slightly modded so the pots act as voltage dividers.

Output is on a monochrome composite tv signal, and the game plays like a dodge ball game where the object is to avoid the ball and take out the other player. You can also launch your own ball and deflect the oncoming attack. When hit the defeated player disappears from the screen for 3 seconds and then another round starts.

On a personal note this project hits close to home, as the project I had planned was a 555 based pong game, and just days before the deadline all I have is a wobbly sync generator, so seeing something close to what I had imagined, and working, makes me smile and feel a little better about my mental status.

Check out a short video after the break, and [Thrashbarg's] previous 555 project, The Synthanola.

As a proof of concept for his long term work in progress “The Pac-Machina” (an electro-mechanical reimagining of a Pac-Man cabinet), [Jonathan] needed some way to make a mechanical Pac-Man, flappy jaw and all. After working through a couple different design possibilities, he decided on an interesting setup which includes using a cog with only half its teeth to make the mouth open and close. Unfortunately, NAMCO BANDAI has asked him nicely not to sell these as kits, but he has helpfully included just about all that is required to make one of these from scratch. [Jonathan] even cut and laser etched his own faux-Victorian frame to keep his proof of concept Pac-Man ready until needed for the main project.

Who would have known that being given the task of planning a holiday party at a wine bar would turn into a hacking project? Well, here’s how that happened. A committee was in charge of the festivities and had decided on doing a mock game show. It wouldn’t really feel like a game show unless you had a contestant lockout system where the first one to hit the button gets a light and a sound while the runners-up get nothing. This is where [RoysterBot] comes in. He built the Quiz-o-Tron from 4 “easy buttons” from staples and an Arduino. After having finished it, he found the system to be somewhat lacking in the excitement area. When a button was pressed it only lit an indicator on the main Quiz-o-Tron box. He decided to add a small circuit inside each of the Easy Buttons using a 555 timer and some LEDs to give them some better feedback. Apparently he was going to patch into the speaker as well, but didn’t have time to get that added.

[via Adafruit]

[Bomber Punk] built his own arcade cabinet, but you won’t find any MAME games here. He made the enclosure to house a Meggy Jr. 8×8 pixel graphics game console. Proper coin-op buttons and a joystick replace the stock tactile switches that come with the kit. [Bomber Punk] has also added a lighted coin slot. A three-cell battery pack powers the beast, with a programming port to one side so that different games can be loaded from a PC. We’d like to see a processor upgrade that would allow multiple games to be stored on a stand-alone system.

Take a look at the video after the break, it’ll bring a smile to your face.

[via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories]

[Thomas Cannon] created his own hacking game by adding some circuitry to this toy vault. The original toy uses the keypad to control a solenoid keeping the door shut. He kept the mechanical setup, but replaced the original circuit board with his own ATmega328 based internals. He also added a USB port to the front. The gist of the game is that you plug-in through USB to gain access to the vault’s terminal software. If you can make your way through the various levels of admin access the loot inside will be yours.