arcade button

20 Articles

A Parts Bin MIDI Controller In 24 Hours

October 20, 2024 by 9 Comments

Part of the reason MIDI has hung on as a standard in the musical world for so long is that it is incredibly versatile. Sure, standard instruments like pianos and drums can be interfaced with a computer fairly easily using this standard, but essentially anything can be converted to a MIDI instrument with the right wiring and a little bit of coding. [Jeremy] needed to build a MIDI controller in a single day, and with just a few off-the-shelf parts he was able to piece together a musical instrument from his parts bin.

The build is housed in an off-brand protective case from a favorite American discount tool store, but the more unique part of the project is the choice to use arcade buttons as the instrument’s inputs. [Jeremy] tied eight of these buttons to an Arduino Uno to provide a full octave’s worth of notes, and before you jump to the comments to explain that there are 12 notes in an octave, he also added a button to the side of the case to bend any note when pressed simultaneously. An emergency stop button serves as a master on/off switch and a MIDI dongle on the other side serves as the interface point to a computer.

After a slight bit of debugging, the interface is up and running within [Jeremy]’s required 24-hour window. He’s eventually planning to use it to control a custom MIDI-enabled drum kit, but for now it was fun to play around with it in some other ways. He’s also posted the project code on a GitHub page. And, if this looks a bit familiar, this was not [Jeremy]’s first MIDI project. He was also the creator of one of the smallest MIDI interfaces we’ve ever seen.

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A 4-Player Arcade Hidden Inside A Coffee Table

May 11, 2023 by 3 Comments

[Ed] from 50% Awesome on YouTube wanted to build a retro gaming system with a decent screen size, but doesn’t have a great deal of space to site it in, so a good compromise was to make a piece of useful furniture and hide all the fun parts inside.

Building an arcade machine usually involves a lot of wiring

This video two-part build log shows a lot of woodwork, with a lot of mistakes (happy accidents, that are totally fine) made along the way, so you do need to repeat them. Essentially it’s a simple maple-veneered plywood box, with a thick lid section hosting the display and some repositioned speakers. This display is taken from a standard LG TV with the control PCB ripped out. The power button/IR PCB was prised out of the bezel, to be relocated, as were the two downwards-facing speakers. The whole collection of parts was attached to a front panel, with copious hot glue, we just hope the heavy TV panel was firmly held in there by other means!

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Stomp Button, Receive Candy

October 19, 2020 by 5 Comments

If there’s any holiday that is worth adjusting for strange times, it’s gotta be Halloween. Are you inclined to leave a bowl of candy on the porch to avoid the doorbell? If so, this is the perfect year to finally figure out some sort of metering apparatus so that greedy preteens are less likely to steal your stash in one sweep. There’s still time to make something fun like [Brankly]’s automatic candy dispenser, which we think ought to stick around for many years to come. Video is posted after the break.

Underneath that skeleton’s jack-o-lantern head is the heart of this build — an orange 5-gallon bucket that matches it perfectly. Simply step on the giant lighted arcade button, and the equally giant NEMA-23 stepper motor moves a 3D-printed turntable inside the bucket with the help of an Arduino Nano. This moves the candy toward the 3D-printed ramp and out the mouth of the jack-o-lantern, where it lands in a bowl that lights up when it hits the bottom thanks to a relay and a second Nano.

[Brankly] made clever use of IR break-beam switches, which sit underneath the two square holes in the ramp. Once candy passes over one of them, the turntable stops and rotates backward to move the candy where it can’t be reached.

Frankly, we love that [Brankly] reused the sound effects module that came with the jack-o-lantern. This build is totally open, and [Brankly] is even giving away 40 PCBs if you want to make your own. For now, you can check out the code and start printing the STLs.

If time is tight, build a spooky slide that puts six feet between you and the trick or treaters.

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Dice Roller Keeps Germs Out Of Your Snake Eyes

October 5, 2020 by 5 Comments

Do you need a to find a more sanitary way to roll the dice at your next socially-distanced board game gathering? [CJA3D]’s pop-o-matic mason jar dice roller can roll the bones two different ways — either by hitting that big, inviting arcade button, or though a web app that everyone can access on their own phones.

We think this looks great, and is a great reuse of a glass jar. The brains of this operation is an ESP8266, which drives a continuous-rotation servo underneath the dice. Push the button or use the web app and the servo disturbs the plate, moving the dice around.

Besides the sanitary aspect, one benefit of using the web app is that there are four different speed presets for the servo. As a bonus, [CJA3D] included the files for a pair of printed 6-sided dice. Click through to the project to see it in action.

We know you take games seriously, and so do we. Just look at this dice roller that uses machine vision to ensure fairness.

Panic Button Is An Audio-Visual Parachute Out Of Zoom Calls

July 29, 2020 by 20 Comments

Everyone has been learning how to stream this year whether they want to or not. This has given rise to the embarrassment paradox, which states that the more urgently you need to kill your camera and microphone feeds in a videoconference call, the more difficult and time-consuming it will be. Zoom in particular will toggle the mic and camera with keyboard shortcuts, but when your toddler waddles into the room swinging a used diaper around in the air, keyboard shortcuts will seem woefully under-powered.

What you need is a single sturdy button that sends both of these toggle commands as quickly as possible. [Simon Prickett]’s panic switch does exactly that. It’s a delightfully tactile arcade button connected to a Trinket M0, which can emulate a keyboard quite easily as an Arduino or CircuitPython device.

This little keyboard doesn’t send these macros directly, because that would be way too risky. What if you were reading Hackaday instead of staring into the tiled faces of your coworkers? Then it wouldn’t work, because Zoom is out of focus.

Instead, it sends an obscure four-key macro to the computer that triggers an AppleScript. [Simon]’s AppleScript checks to see if Zoom is running. If not, it has the system announce the fact. If it is running, then the script sends cmd+shift+a and cmd+shift+v to Zoom directly to toggle the audio and video. Check out the demo after the break.

As you might expect, we’ve seen a couple of videoconference survival hacks over the past few months. Need to show something or work with your hands, but only have one camera? All you need is a mirror, a clothespin, and a length of wire for a simple split-screen setup.

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Bubbles, The People-Pleasing Pandemic Panda

July 13, 2020 by 10 Comments

This year, [Thomas]’ neighborhood has gone from a quiet burg to a bustling lane full of families and children who go out walking for exercise and a change of scenery. Early on, a game emerged to distract children from the pandemic by turning these walks into bear hunts — that is, looking for stuffed bears sitting in the windows of houses and keeping count of them.

With no stuffed bears in the house, he decided to join in the fun by pasting up a 2D panda bear in the window that’s cute enough to calm anyone’s nerves. That was fun for a while, but then he turned it up to eleven by making an interactive 3D version named Bubbles the Bear that blows bubbles and speaks in a friendly voice.

Bubbles sits in a second-story window and waits for passers-by to press one of the buttons mounted on the utility pole below. Both buttons are wired to a 433MHz remote that sends a signal to an ESP32 in Bubbles’ habitat that says it’s time to perform.

We particularly like the bubble maker that [Thomas] designed, which aims a blower fan with an air concentrator at a carousel of 3D printed bubble wands. Both the fan and the carousel can be controlled with a custom web app, and he gets an email every time Bubbles has a visitor that tells him how much bubble liquid is left. Check out the fun-size demo after the break.

Bubbles are fun, especially if you can make them in extremely large quantities. Bubbles can also do work — remember this next time you need a random number generator.

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Electronic Connect Four Has No Pieces To Lose

June 15, 2020 by 6 Comments

Recreating classic games in software is a great way to get better at coding or learn to code in the first place. If you do it in hardware though, you’ll gain a lot more than coding skills. Just ask [Kelly] and [Jack] did, when they built this Arduino-based electronic Connect Four for a school project.

We love that their interpretation manages to simplify game play and make it more fun than the original version. All the players have to do is turn it on and start pushing the arcade buttons along the bottom to choose the column where they want to make a play. The LEDs animate from top to bottom to imitate the plastic disc dropping down through the board. If a win is detected — four in a row of the same color going any direction — the board fills up with the winning color and the game starts over.

The state machine doesn’t currently do anything about tie situations, so there’s a reset button hidden on the side. As [Kelly] and [Jack] explain in their walk-through video after the break, that is something they would like to address in the future, along with making it possible to choose whatever battle color you want. We think a reset animation that mimics the look of the discs spilling out the bottom would be cool, too.

If you’ve never implemented a game on hardware before, something like this might be a bit daunting. May we suggest a game of 4×4 Tic Tac Toe instead?

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