Controlling A Game Room With Amazon Echo

November 27, 2016 by Cameron Coward 2 Comments

If there are two things we love here at Hackaday, it’s games and automating mundane tasks by adding a lot of electronics and voice control. A game room is, therefore, the perfect sandbox for projects that get us excited in all of the right ways. Liberty Games, a UK-based games room company, already had a really impressive game room (as you might expect). They’ve just posted an awesome build log showcasing how they went about automating mundane game room tasks by adding a lot of electronics and voice control.

There were four tasks that Liberty Games wanted to be able to complete with voice control: releasing billiards balls on their pool table, adding credits to an arcade machine, releasing pinballs on a pinball machine, and control of a CD jukebox. For all of these tasks, they used an Amazon Echo, which already has built-in support for adding new “skills” (Amazon’s term for user-created Alexa commands). These skills allow the Echo to communicate with other devices using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

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A Trove Of Arcade Projects

November 11, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 4 Comments

[Ryan Bates] loves arcade games, any arcade games. Which is why you can find claw machines, coin pushers, video games, and more on his website.

We’ve covered his work before with his Venduino project. We also really enjoyed his 3D printed arcade joystick based off the design of a commercial variant. His coin pushing machine could help some us finally live our dream of getting a big win out of the most insidious gambling machine at arcades meant for children.

Speaking of frustrating gambling machines for children, he also built his own claw machine. Nothing like enabling test mode and winning a fluffy teddy bear or an Arduino!

It’s quite a large site and there’s good content hidden in nooks and crannys, so explore. He also sells kits, but it’s well balanced against a lot of open source files if you’d like to do it yourself. If you’re wondering how he gets it all done, his energy drink review might provide a clue.

Ultra-Polished, Handmade Settlers Of Catan Redux

October 30, 2016 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Fuzzy Wobble] and [Amy Wang]’s Deep Space Settlers project is a one-of-a-kind re-invention of the popular board game Settlers of Catan, and showcases the polished results that are possible with the fabrication tools and methods available in many workshops and hackerspaces today. We reached out to the makers for some of the fabrication details, which they were happy to share.

(For those of you who are familiar with the game, technically this is a remake and slight evolution of the Seafarers expansion to the base Settlers of Catan game. A few rule changes were made, but it is mostly a total remodel and redesign.)

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Arcade Cabinet Build Takes Quarters, Dispenses Fun

October 9, 2016 by Richard Baguley 15 Comments

Building an arcade cabinet seems to be a rite of passage for many hackers and woodworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with that: as this series of posts from [Alessandro] at boxedcnc shows, there is an art to doing it well.

His final build is impressive, with quality buttons, a genuine-looking banner, and even a coin slot so he can charge people to play. His build log covers both the carpentry and electronic aspects of the build, from cutting the panels to his own code for running the coin acceptor that takes your quarter (or, as he is in Italy, Euro coins) and triggers the game to play.

To extract money from his family, he used the Sparkfun COM-1719 coin acceptor, which can be programmed to send different pulses for different coins, connected to an Arduino which is also connected to the joystick and buttons. The Arduino emulates a USB keyboard and is connected to an old PC running MAME with the Attract Mode front end. It’s a quality build, down to the Bubble Bobble banner, and the coin slot means that it might even make some money back eventually.

Giant-Scale Physical Pong

September 10, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

At first, we thought we were having deja vu, but then we saw this video embedded below. [Thijs Eerens] is a creative technologist (dare we say, a “hacker”?) who builds giant-scale games for a living. For the Lowlands festival in the Netherlands, he contributed to the build of a huge Pong game that looks as big as a cinema screen.

The paddles appear to be controlled by pulling ropes, and the “ball” is driven around on a system of wires and stepper motors. Code running in the background tracks the player paddles, drives the ball, and keeps score. From the video, there seem to be sound effects involved. It looks like a lot of fun.

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Why Buy Your Children A Game Console When You Can Build Them One?

April 5, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 45 Comments

[buildxyz] had no opposition to his kids playing video games, but wanted something that offered a bit more parental control, a larger game selection, and was maybe a little more contained than a modern game console.

So, in his multi-part build log, he goes through all the steps of making a Raspberry Pi into a kid friendly wall-mounted game console. The frame is made from Baltic Birch plywood, and the edges look cool when stained. The display is an old HP monitor, and the speakers are simple beige bricks from the thrift store. The controllers hook into a USB hub on the front. It’s not a complicated build, but it’s very well done.

The coolest feature, from the parent’s point of view, is the combination lock on the front. A rotary encoder surrounded by NeoPixels provides the input and feedback. Depending on the code [buildxyz] inputs his children can receive different periods of dopamine hits, and if he enters a special code for occasions like birthdays, unlimited play time becomes available.

We hope he’s prepared to have the only four year olds who can crack safes on the block. The build looks awesome, and there’s not really a commercial product out there to match it. Watch the video.

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TwoBitCircus: The Business Of Building Interactive Entertainment

October 14, 2014 by Ben Delarre No comments

The Hackaday 10th anniversary was an awful lot of fun, and part of what made it awesome was all the cool things that the community brought to the event. We hadn’t really had a chance to get down to meet the guys from TwoBitCircus before now but they were more than happy to bring along their excellent Hexacade machine. The 6-player custom built arcade game that was an absolute blast!

After the party TwoBitCircus’ fearless leaders [Brent Bushnell] and [Eric Gradman] invited us over to their space for a quick look at their workshop, and to give us a personal invite to the Hacker Preview day for their upcoming STEAM Carnival. No this isn’t Steam as in Steam-punk, but STEAM as in Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics.

Their space is really quite amazing, part of The Brewery Art Colony near downton Los Angeles. The building is actually an old steam power plant with incredibly high ceilings. The TwoBitCircus crew is now about 30 people all building interactive games and art pieces for events. They call themselves a digital circus and a lot of their work harkens back to old carnival games of yore with a new digital twist.

[Eric] and [Brent] spared a few minutes to give us a quick run down of what sort of games to expect at the STEAM Carnival. There will be a wide array of entertainment: giant marble runs controlled by see-saws, whack-a-mole/twister mashups on huge glowing button walls, laser based foosball, and the more extreme immolation dunk tank! It will be a most entertaining and educational event. The main public days are on the weekend of 25th – 26th of October, but there is an invite only hacker preview for the local community on Thursday October 23rd which we will be attending. If you’d like to go to the main event, use the code HACKADAY for $5 off the ticket price of $25.

What was most interesting about TwoBitCircus for me as a maker of things was how these guys have turned their hobby into a thriving events business. Brent tells us that they’ve been at this for 8 years now and the company has been around for 3. They’re doing pretty well too, making incredible things for some of the biggest companies around. This really is the best possible job for any inventive hacker sort, building crazy stuff all day for people to play with! I left the place feeling incredibly envious.

Check out the photos below for some impression of the sort of craziness you might see at the carnival!

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