One of our younger hackers just finished off this awesome Instructable on his flexible 14 x 15 pixel, pong playing t-shirt!
[GenAap] has been working on this on and off for the past year, and finally debuted it at a few Halloween parties last month — it was a hit. He’s made the screen out of RGB LED strips, cleverly soldered together into a large flexible panel of 14 by 15 full colour pixels.
An Arduino Mega takes care of the logic to run the game, which [GenAap] wrote all himself! There’s also a cleverly designed controller using a slide-potentiometer and single button. To play back, the computer AI uses about 15 lines of code, which for pong, is more than enough. He’s also made the whole thing removable so you can still wash the shirt. Finally, the batteries and the “Magic Box” go into a pocket for simplicity’s sake.
If you’re interested in making your own, he also has a Github repository of everything you need. Stick around after the break to see a demonstration of the shirt by [GenAap] himself!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KuRdNdW7DE
For other wearable gaming costumes, did you catch the Gameboy Color Costume?
Nicely done, and great for picking up the ladies, “Oh, Pong, how do I play?”, “Just grab my knob baby.”
Does it have a demo mode so you can just leave it running to attract attention?
No score board?
An automated mode crossed my mind, and now that you have me thinking it would be easy enough to add. I’ll probably do it in the future.
It is a bit hard to see the score keeping in the video. It keeps track of the points on the paddles. When a point is scored, the lights making up the scorer’s paddle change color. It count’s in binary starting with the bottom light as the 1’s place, next up as the 2’s place and so on. 21 (top-middle-bottom) is what is needed to win.
Good job [GenAap], keep hacking.
Thanks, I will. I already have my next project in the works. :)
In his instructables he states that he’s using 30 pixels per meter strip… but it looks more like 60 per meter to me based on the 60 per meter strip i have.
Definitely 60/m
Thank’s for catching that. It’s fixed.