K’nex Pinball Machine Is A Playable Work Of Art

May 7, 2021 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

It’s really a wonder that we missed this one, what with all the extra time in front of a computer we’ve had over the last year or so. But better late than never, we always say, so behold, (a little at a time, because there’s quite a lot to look at), [Tyler Bower]’s pinball machine built entirely from K’nex.

Where do we even start? This is a full-size pinball machine, as in 7′ tall, 5′ long, and 3′ wide. [Tyler] estimates that it’s made from about 16,000 pieces, or around 73 pounds of plastic, much of which was obtained locally and is secondhand. Many of those pieces make up the ten drill motor-driven chain lifts in the back — these move the ball through the machine after it goes through one of the track triggers and return it to the playfield in various delightful ways.

Speaking of ways to score, there are nine of them total, and some are harder to get to than others. They all involve some really amazing K’nex movement, and each one uses aluminum foil switches to trigger scoring through a MaKey MaKey.

Of course there’s a multi-ball mode, but our favorite has to be the trap door in the playfield that gets you to the mini pinball game in the upper left, because only the best pinball games have some kind of mini game. Either that, or our favorite is the rotating arm that swings around gracefully and drops the ball on a track. Anyway, all nine elements are explored in the video after the break, which frankly we could watch on repeat. If you’re hungry for more details, there’s quite a bit of info in the description.

The only thing this machine is missing is a tilt switch, but as you’ll see in the video, it would probably get triggered quite often. Is this somehow not cool enough for you? Here’s a slightly bigger K’nex ball machine that doesn’t seem to move as much, but also isn’t a full freaking pinball machine complete with meta game.

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Harpsi-Gourd Gets You Into Thanksgiving Spirit

November 6, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

Halloween might be over, but for some of us there’s still another pumpkin-centric holiday right around the corner to give us an excuse to build projects out of various gourds. During a challenge at a local event, [Michael] came up with a virtual cornucopia of uses for all of the squashes he had on hand and built a touch-sensitive piano with all of them.

The musical instrument was dubbed the Harpsi-Gourd and makes extensive use of the Arduino touch-sensitive libraries. Beyond that, the project was constructed to be able to fit into a standard sized upright piano. While only 15 pumpkins are currently employed, the instrument can be scaled up to 48 pumpkins. Presumably they would need to be very small for the lid of the piano to still close.

The Harpsi-Gourd is a whimsical re-imagining of the original Makey Makey which can be used to do all kinds of things, including play Mario Bros. There are all kinds of other food-based musical instruments at your disposal as well, though.

Staying In And Playing Skyrim Has Rarely Been This Healthy

July 9, 2016 by James Hobson 4 Comments

Looking to add some activity to your day but don’t want to go through a lot of effort? [D10D3] has the perfect solution that enables you to take a leisurely bike ride through Skyrim. A standing bicycle combines with an HTC Vive (using the add-on driver VorpX which allows non-vr enabled games to be played with a VR headset) and a Makey Makey board to make slack-xercise — that’s a word now — part of your daily gaming regimen.

The Makey Makey is the backbone of the rig; it allows the user to set up their own inputs with electrical contacts that correspond to keyboard and mouse inputs, thereby allowing one to play a video game in some potentially unorthodox ways — in this case, riding a bicycle.

Setting up a couple buttons for controlling the Dragonborn proved to be a simple process. Buttons controlling some of the main inputs were plugged into a breadboard circuit which was then connected to the Makey Makey along with the ground wires using jumpers. As a neat addition, some aluminium foil served as excellent contacts for the handlebars to act as the look left and right inputs. That proved to be a disorienting addition considering the Vive’s head tracking also moves the camera. Continue reading “Staying In And Playing Skyrim Has Rarely Been This Healthy” →

Makey Makey Made Smaller

May 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

When it launched in 2012, the Makey Makey was the golden child of the maker movement. It was a simple, easy to use board with holes for alligator clips and a USB socket that would present capacitive touch pads as a USB HID device. Thus, the banana piano was born.

The Makey Makey is a device specifically designed to introduce kids to electronics in a way the Arduino can’t match; even with an Arduino, most of the work is with code. If you’re introducing electronics to a class of 10-year-olds, that might be a bit too much.

Now there’s a new Makey Makey on the block. It’s the Makey Makey Go, and it’s the same user experience as the Makey Makey classic made cheaper and much more rugged.

The Makey Makey Go features a single touch pad to clamp an alligator clip to. That’s enough to send any keypress or a mouse click over USB, where a wide variety of apps and games can make this tiny thumb drive-sized board useful. Banana pianos are out, and plant harps and Jello Flappy Bird are in.

There aren’t many details about the internals of the Makey Makey Go, but [Jay] from Makey Makey says the prototypes are based on the ATMega32u4, while the production units will use cheaper chips. Video below.

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Play Music With Your Painting Using Teensy

February 21, 2015 by Theodora Fabio 5 Comments

[sab-art], a collaboration between [Sophia Brueckner] and [Eric Rosenbaum], has created a touch-sensitive musical painting. Initially, basic acrylic paint is used for the majority of the canvas. Once that is dry, conductive paint is used to make the shapes that will be used for the capacitive touch sensing. As an added step to increase the robustness, nails are hammered through each painted shape and connected with wiring in the back of the painting. These wires are then connected to the inputs of a Teensy++ 2.0, using Arduino code based on MaKey MaKey to output MIDI. The MIDI is then sent to a Mac Mini which then synthesizes the sound using Ableton Live. Any MIDI-processing software would work, though. For this particular painting, external speakers are used, but incorporating speakers into your own composition is certainly possible.

A nice aspect of this project is that it can be as simple or as complex as you choose. Multiple conductive shapes can be connected through the back to the same Teensy input so that they play the same sound. While [sab-art] went with a more abstract look, this can be used with any style. Imagine taking a painting of Dogs Playing Poker and having each dog bark in its respective breed’s manner when you touch it, or having spaceships make “pew pew” noises. For a truly meta moment, an interactive MIDI painting of a MIDI keyboard would be sublime. [sab-art] is refining the process with each new painting, so even more imaginative musical works of art are on the horizon. We can’t wait to see and hear them!

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The Pac-Man Bus Stop For Gamers At Heart

August 29, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 7 Comments

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Waiting for the bus can be drag. You never know exactly when it will come, always looking down the road hoping to spot the vehicle as it turns a corner. When it doesn’t show up right away, the result is usually staring down at a ‘smart’ phone checking it for any incoming messages. Directing the attention up might produce a list of estimated arrival times and maybe even a map showing the routes that are taken throughout the day. But there is only one bus stop in the entire world, that we know of, where people can play Pac-Man while they watch for the bus to arrive.

It was created by the combining efforts of two maker communities in town. Norwegian Creations and Trondheim Makers teamed up to build an interactive gaming display that gave individuals the ability to pass the time by directing the famous video gaming character around a blue maze, eating yellow pellets and avoiding colorful ghosts along the way. This display was also made to raise awareness for the upcoming Trondheim Maker Faire that year. They choose Pac-Man as the foundation and integrated a slightly modified invention kit called Makey Makey with a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie into the actual frame of the bus stop. The people involved must have had some serious business connections in order to get approval for that. They figuratively hacked into the bus stop’s power grid gaining the necessary 230 volts required to energize the custom gaming unit. Once hooked up, anyone standing by could play Pac-Man until the bus came. [Ragnar] at Norwegian Creations told us in an email that future ideas of theirs include syncing up several stops that can communicate with each other, which could lead to some great multiplayer interactions. They also have a fantastic video that they uploaded that shows the building process of their current design. Check that out below, and let us know what other types of games you would like to see at a bus stop near you.

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Fruit Piano Uses A Different Circuit Than The Makey Makey

February 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

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[Hasbi Sevinç] is using perishable goods in his electronics project. The orange, tomato, and two apples seen above act as keys for the virtual piano. The concept is the same as the Makey Makey which is often demonstrated as a banana piano. This implementation uses an Arduino to read the sensors and to connect to the computer running the piano program.

You can see there’s a fair amount of circuitry built on the breadboard. Each piece of fruit has its own channel to make it into a touch sensor. The signal produced when your finger contacts the food is amplified by transistors connected in a Darlington pair. That circuit drives the low side of a optoisolator transmitter. The receiving side of it is connected the I/O pin of the Arduino. You can see the schematic as well as a demo clip after the break.

This use of hardware frees up a lot of your microcontroller cycles. That’s because projects like this banana piano use the timers to measure RC decay. [Hasbi’s] setup provides a digital signal that at most only needs to be debounced.

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