Hackaday Links: Sunday, May 26th, 2013

May 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 56 Comments

The warmer months cometh and it’s time to think of this year’s Burning Man. [Matt’s] already set himself up with a sound-reactive LED project he calls the Seed of Life.

Older readers, and those who really know their hobby electronic history, will know the name Heathkit. Many readers tipped us off about their triumphant return. We’re not sure what form this reincarnation will take, but you can help shape it by participating in the survey.

Dust off that MSP430 launchpad and turn it into a composite video Pong console.

Here’s a way to use your Android phone as a computer mouse.

We’re not quite sure what this is, but turn your volume down before watching the video about a modular sythesizer hack.

[Arkadiusz Spiewak] wrote in to share some of the printing success (translated) he’s had recently with the H-bot style printer we saw a while back.

Strap an Arduino and an Electric Imp to your arm (and everyone else’s) and it’ll remember everyone you meet. You know, kind of like Google Glass but with geeky arm-wear instead of geeky headgear?

And finally, [Nerick] has just finished a thermometer project using Nixie tubes (translated).

Perpetual Pong

April 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

perpetual-pong

[Jeff Joray] wrote in to show off this perpetual Pong device he built. The six by ten LED matrix acts as a game board for Pong but there are no controls. The board simply plays against itself. It’s pretty much a pong clock without the clock.

The brain of the device is a PIC 16F684 which drives the six rows of the display directly. He went with a decade counter (CD74HC401) to scan the rows one at a time. Now what would you expect to find on the underside of this hunk of protoboard? A rat’s nest of point to point wiring? If so you’re going to be disappointed. [Jeff] spent the time to generate a schematic and board layout in Eagle. While at it, he knew he was going to be using protoboard so the artwork is designed to use solder bridging as much as possible. What he ends up with is one of the cleanest mutiplexed one-off projects you’re going to find. See it in action after the jump.

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POV Pong Game Uses All Kinds Of Smart Design

March 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.