Gaming On An 8x8x8 LED Cube

April 9, 2014 by Nick Conn 17 Comments

LEDCube

Building an LED cube is a great way to learn how to solder, while building something that looks awesome. Without any previous experience with soldering or coding, [Anred] set out to create a simple 8x8x8 LED cube gaming platform.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, [Andred] based the LED cube off of three separate Instructables. The resulting cube came out great, and the acrylic casing around it adds a very nice touch. Using an Arduino Mega, the 74HC574, and a few MOSFET’s to drive his LEDs, the hardware is fairly standard. What sets this project apart from many other LED cube builds, is the fact that you can game on it using a PlayStation 1 controller. All the necessary code to get up and running is included in the Instructable (commented in German). Be sure to see the cube in action after the break!

It would be great to see a wireless version of this LED cube game. What kind of LED cube will gaming be brought to next? A tiny LED cube? The biggest LED cube ever? Only time will tell.

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One Pixel Video Game Rises From RGB Button Hardware

August 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys No comments

This project was completely component driven. [Christopher] and [Robert] wanted to try out buttons with an RGB backlight option. They found the one shown above, which looks fantastic. It should since it costs over twenty bucks in single units. What they came up with is a one pixel video game that works like a color matching version of Simon Says. The button will show you the target color for just a moment. The player then holds the button as it fades through colors. Releasing it at the right instant will produce a green flash, a wrong shade results in a red flash.

They went with an Arduino Mega for the project as that was within easy reach. A hunk of protoboard is used as a shield, it includes the button itself, connected through some current limiting resistors to the pins that drive the LED. There is also a tactile switch which actuates the AVR’s reset pin.

When trying to get the LED to fade through the full range of colors [Christopher] was hit with a common problem. Since our eyes don’t detect changes in low and high intensity light the same way, you can’t use linear changes in PWM and get a smooth result. He fixed this by using Gaussian curves to set the intensity levels.

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North Street Labs Try To Spice Up A Game Of Tic-Tac-Toe

May 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

tic-tac-toe-stomp-box

The team at North Street Labs really went all out with this Tic-Tack-Toe stomp box. At its most basic it’s a blinky version of the simple two-player game. But there’s always some added appeal when you make large manifestations of normally small items; the 10x Arduino is a good example of this.

The project is NSL’s qualifying entry for this year’s Red Bull Creation Contest (has it already been a year since the last contest?). A special Arduino shield was produced once again, this time it features hardware necessary to control LED strips… a lot of them. That led to the creation of this box, which houses a ton of strip sections inside to light the grid based on tapping one of the red buttons with your foot. We’d image the game would be seldom used at your hackerspace, but they take it to show off at the local children’s museum and it’s a huge hit with the kids!

BASH Games

February 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Get serious about your shell scripting skills and maybe you can pull this one off. It’s a game of snake played in a BASH shell. It seems like a coding nightmare, but the final product turns out to be organized well enough for us to understand and took less than 250 lines of code.

[Martin Bruchanov] started on the project after pining for an old DOS game called Housenka. It’s another version of the classic Snake game which we’ve coded ourselves and seen in several projects including this head-to-head version using musical recorders as controllers. When using a terminal emulator capable of ANSI sequences the game is displayed in color using extended characters.

We give [Martin] bonus points for the way he wrote about his project. It describes the mechanics most would be interested in, like how the user input is captured and what drives the update function and food generation. The rest of the details can be gleaned by reading through the code itself.

Art Installation Plots Every Game Of Lunar Lander That Is Played

November 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This art installation makes a video game from the 1970’s popular again. It can be found at the Dublin Science Gallery’s GAME exhibition. Museum goers step up to the coin-op style game cabinet and the onlookers will see how they’re doing as the landing is plotted on this board.

Hardware details are a bit hard to come by but we hear that there will me more on the build posted soon. For now the Flickr set is the best source of information. From reading the captions we know that a set of three Mac minis run everything. There are also a few close-ups and a video overview of the drive hardware which you can see mounted on the upper left of the image above. We can tell you that this is a string plotter similar to builds we’ve seen in the past. The telemetry data from the Lunar Lander game is converted to instructions and fed directly to that device. See it in action in the clip after the break.

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Scripting To Automate Your Mindless Android Games

November 9, 2012 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

There’s a silly little Android game making some noise on the Interwebs. It’s called Curiosity which is a 3D cube with something inside. The thing is, every single pixel on the cube must be clicked in order to get through a layer. There are of course multiple layers, and… well, you get the point. [Stephen] figures this is a perfect thing for a bit of scripting and set out to find a way to automatically play the Android game.

As you can see above he’s got a pretty good start. To use the script in its current form he finds a part of the cube that is mostly solid green. The Android device is plugged into a computer using the USB cable, and the Android Debug Bridge runs the script. It’s amazingly simple, as it uses the monkeyrunner package which comes with the SDK. The proof is there, and it’s just a matter of whether or not he wants to spend his time to fully automate the playing of the game. You can see a demo of the script embedded after the break.

[Stephen’s] not new to automating things that he doesn’t want to do himself. Here’s an example of his code beating the PlayThru CAPTCHA.

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Fantastic Programming Makes This Arduino Gaming Device Something Special

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

The hardware that went into this Arduino gaming console is just fine. But the coding that produced this game called Twisted SNAKE is beyond compare. [Rodot] has programmed several games for the hardware, which uses an Arduino, 160×168 TFT screen, a 3 axis accelerometer, and two input buttons. If you’re interested, there is a forum thread in which he talks a bit more about the hardware design. But you’re not going to want to pass up either of the two videos embedded after the break.

The first clip shows off a bouncing-ball platforming game. The accelerometer moves the ball back and forth, and the top scrolling level brings more ledges into play. This in itself is a great game. But the Twisted SNAKE game shown off in the second video makes our own ARM-based Snake game look like a 3-year-old programmed it. [Rodot] filled up all of the program memory of the ATmega328 chip to make this happen. There’s a menu system which allows for color themes and difficulty selection. The game play itself lets the snake travel anywhere it wishes with the tail following behind in graceful curves. Wow!

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