POV Pong Game Uses All Kinds Of Smart Design

March 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

pov-pong-game-uses-smart-design

This little device lets you play some head-to-head pong using a spinning LED display. We’re really in love with the design. You get a pretty good idea of the Persistence of Vision aspect of the build by looking at this picture. But hearing [Dennis] explain the entire design in the video after the break has us really loving its features.

He’s using the head from a VCR as the spinning motor. The display itself uses a vertical row of LEDs with a bit of wax paper as a diffuser. These are current limited by a 1k resistor for each of the eight pixels. They’re driven by a PIC 16F690 but you may have already noticed that there’s no battery on the spinning part of the board. It gets voltage and ground from a pair of brushes which he fabricated himself. To avoid having to do the same thing to map the control buttons in the base to the spinning board he came up with something special. There’s a downward facing phototransisor which registers LED signals from the base to move the paddles up or down.

If you love this project check out the POV Death Star.

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TV Show Inspires This Smaller Pong Paddles Hardware Hack

January 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

smaller-pong-paddles

When we read “smaller paddles” we immediately thought of the physical controllers that you hold in your hands. But this hack alters the size of the virtual Pong paddles displayed on the TV screen.

We remember quite well the episode of That 70’s Show where Red and Kelso take apart their Pong machine to hack it. The video after the break which [Blues Image] put together shuffles scenes from that episode in with images of his hack. The characters are adamant that the game is too easy and reducing the size of the virtual paddles is the only thing that will make it fun again. After building his own hardware from the original schematics, [Blue Image] figured this challenge was worth a try.

His solution is in the form of two man-in-the-middle boards which insert a way to reroute the pins without altering the main board. One of the chips is used to draw the paddles, the other checks for collisions with the ball. By changing the pin-out the paddles are reduced from fifteen pixels down to seven.

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Gaming System Inside An Atari Joystick

January 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

gaming-system-inside-an-atari-controller

This original Atari controller is pretty small (take a look at that RCA cable for a sense of scale). Despite it’s size, [Kyle Brinkerhoff] managed to fit a complete gaming system inside the controller. This Pocket Sized Atari is a follow-up to another project he did called ArduPong which let him play Pong using a joystick and an Arduino. This rendition takes the external project box from that build and moves everything into one tight little package.

In the video after the break [Kyle] gives us a tour of the internals. The Arduino board he went with is an Ardweeny which is no bigger than the ATmega328 footprint so it can be easily mounted off to one side. The joystick internals have been replaced with the analog stick module from a PlayStation controller. That is where the button came from as well. Just connect this to a 9V battery and the composite video input of a TV and you’re ready to do some gaming!

Now if you just want that retro look for your Xbox Live games check out this Xbox 360 controller in an Atari joystick.

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Fabricating Hardware From The Original Arcade Pong Schematics

December 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

original-arcade-pong-rebuild

This heavily populated PCB is a recreation of the original arcade version of Pong. That is an important distinction because the home version of Pong used a specialized chip to do much of the work. This is basically all stock logic, which explains the high component count. We wonder how many quarters it took just to pay for all 66 chips at the time?

[Pong74ls] was the person who took on this project. There is an original schematic available, but it’s incredibly crowded and rather difficult to figure out. Fortunately [Dan Boris] has already done a lot of the heavy work. He took the one-page nightmare and turned it into a sixteen page plan for building the original board (look for the schematic link under technical details).

Before the board could be laid out some redesign work was necessary. It sounds like some of the original chips are out of production and suitable replacements needed to be found. The board was then laid out in Eagle before sending the design off to a fab house. There was just one error which didn’t allow the ball to bounce when hitting a paddle while travelling downward. A couple of jumper wires fixed that right up!

[via Reddit]

[Original Reddit Post]

Building Pong For An 8-pin Micro

December 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

pong

For playing around with video signals and trying to create a an interesting microcontroller project, you can’t do better than the classic Pong. We’ve seen our share of microcontroller-based pong builds, but rarely have we seen an 8-pin microcontroller recreate every part of the first video game.

[Tim] started his PIC12F1840-based Pong build with just a few buttons for controls and a video output. This in itself is somewhat of an achievement, as [Tim] used all the data memory and every GPIO pin on this small microcontroller.

He had time to optimize his build and ended up adding the bleeps and bloops of the original Pong to his build. He’s got an interesting design on his hands, and also what is probably the smallest Pong clone in existence.

MonoPong: A CMOS 1-D Pong

November 23, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 6 Comments

We’ve seen a few 1-D pong games recently, and they’ve all be controlled using microcontrollers. Inspired by some of these hacks, [mischka] built the monoPong using a handful of logic chips.

The monoPong has four major components. A 555 timer in astable mode provides a clock source which is fed into a 4510 decade counter, which connects to a 4028 BCD to decimal decoder to drive the LEDs. Finally, a 4011 NAND gate IC is used to deal with the button presses. Two of the NAND gates form a RS flip-flop, and the other two NAND each player’s button with the last LED on the player’s side of the strip. If the player hits the button when their LED is on, the RS flip-flop toggles and changes the decade counter from count up to count down mode. This makes the ball bounce back.

[mischka] finished the project off by putting it in a wooden box and drilling holes for the LEDs, buttons, and a power switch. The final product looks pretty good, and is a great example of how you can use a couple logic chips instead of a microcontroller.

After the break, watch a quick game of monoPong.

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One Dimensional PONG, Take Two

November 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

Needing a Christmas present for his 4- and 5-year-old nieces, [John] built a one-dimensional PONG game, sure to be the delight of rosy-cheeked children on a Christmas morn.

The new and improved 1D PONG game is built around a digital RGB LED strip with an LPD8806 LED controller. The speed of the ‘ball’ is controlled by a pot on one side of the game. With each player pressing their button at the right time, the ball bounces back to the other player. Missing the ball awards a point to the other team and most likely an increase in the player’s frustration, greatly increasing the risk of this game being thrown across the room.

While it’s not an obscenely long 1D PONG game like [Jason]’s previous 5 meter version, it’s more than enough to keep a pair of kids occupied for more than a few minutes, a remarkable achievement for just a microcontroller, buttons, and a piece of LED strip.

You can get [John]’s AVR code in this pastebin or just check out the video after the break.

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