A Mini Stacker Arcade Cabinet

January 7, 2018 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

For [LumoW], what started as a school project turned into a passion project. He and his team made a hardware implementation of an arcade game called Stacker. Never heard of it? It’s pretty fun, kind of like an inverse Tetris. You can play the flash version here and see their mini arcade version after the break.

The game is based around the Mojo FPGA which the class required, and it’s programmed entirely in bitwise operators. It uses WS2812 RGB LEDs to represent the individual tower building blocks, and these are mounted on plywood in a matrix and separated into cells by a grid of foam board. After some trial and error, the team found the perfect shade of acrylic to diffuse the bright dots into glowing squares.

Since the game only needs one input, we don’t think [LumoW] should apologize at all for using the biggest, baddest button they could find. Besides, the game has that edge-of-your-seat action that can turn panic into heavy-handedness and cool DIY arcade games into shards of sadness.

Looking for something more advanced to do with an FPGA? Try your hand at vector games.

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Easy UFO Lights On Your Drone For Halloween

October 29, 2016 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

Sometimes it’s not so much what you put together, it’s how you use it. The folks at Adafruit have put up a project on how to dress up your drone with ‘UFO lights’ just in time for Halloween. The project is a ring of RGB LEDs and a small microcontroller to give any quadcopter a spinning ‘tractor beam light’ effect. A 3D printed fixture handles attachment. If you’re using a DJI Phantom 4 like they are, you can power everything directly from the drone using a short USB cable, which means hardly any wiring work at all, and no permanent changes of any kind to the aircraft. Otherwise, you’re on your own for providing power but that’s probably well within the capabilities of anyone who messes with add-ons to hobby aircraft.

One thing this project demonstrates is how far things have come with regards to accessibility of parts and tools. A 3D printed fixture, an off-the-shelf RGB LED ring, and a drop-in software library for a small microcontroller makes this an afternoon project. The video (embedded below) also demonstrates how some unfamiliar lights and some darkness goes a long way toward turning the otherwise familiar Phantom quadcopter into a literal Unidentified Flying Object.

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Who Could Resist A Color Coded Clock?

October 3, 2016 by Kristina Panos 27 Comments

[Luc] wanted to make a clock like no other. He knows that the territory is well-trod, especially in the area of minimalist design. Undeterred, [Luc] came up with a fresh design that uses the resistor color code to display the time. He’s calling it the Nerd’s Ultimate Watch.

It doesn’t get much more minimalist than four RGB LEDs. Each one illuminates in the color that represents the digit in the current time. For instance, I’m typing this sentence at 1:37PM. The clock uses 24-hour time, so let’s call it 13:37. Using resistor color code time, that’s 1, 3, 3, 7, or brown, orange, orange, violet.
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Czech Out Raspberry Pi Riding The Rails

January 2, 2016 by Rud Merriam 6 Comments

If you were wandering around Prague this Christmas season you may have spotted a Raspberry Pi 2 controlled Christmas tree. But you had to look quick because it was on the back of a special tram car that lubricates the rails around the city to reduce noise. The colors on the tree were determined by a web site that allowed visitors to change the colors. The same system, with a few adjustments, controlled a tree in the entrance hall of Czech Technical University in Prague at Karlovo.

The adjustments weren’t trival. Power was a problem, for one. The electrical noise from the tram’s drive motors needed to be filtered by using a switching power supply. Cold temperatures might have created a frozen Pi so they added a heater. After all, everyone loves warm Pi. The LEDs on the tree were handled by a WS2811 addressable LED driver chip.

You can catch the tram any time on the web, but the tree will be gone once the Christmas season ends.

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The HEXXX Gaming Console

October 1, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Worried about bringing a project to demo at CCC15 (The Chaos Communication Camp), [Anthony Liekens] had to act fast. He would have brought his giant Flying Spaghetti-Monster Display (FSM for short), but unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in his car. So, looking around his garage he realized he had a pile of extra RGB LEDs, and a broken iCade Core. The gears in his head started turning and he came up with the idea for the HEXXX Gaming Console.

So what is it? It’s a hexagonal console designed for three-person gaming — like his Tron for Three and Pong for Three — he even has a 6 player Flappy Bird clone! From conception to reality, it took a mere ten stressful evenings to complete… The end result is quite fantastic. Continue reading “The HEXXX Gaming Console” →

Overengineering Beer Pong

April 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

If there’s one game that deserves to be overengineered with hundreds of LEDs, sensors, and electronic modules, it’s beer pong. [Jeff] has created the most ostentatious beer pong table we’ve ever seen. It’s just shy of playing beer pong on a single gigantic LED display, and boy, does it look good.

The table includes a 32×12 grid of LEDs in the center of the table, with 10 pods for Solo cups at each end of the table. These pods have 20 RGB LEDs each and infrared sensors that react to a cup being placed on them. The outer edge of the table has 12 LED rings for spectators, giving this beer pong table 1122 total LEDs on 608 individual channels.

With that many LEDs, how to drive all of them becomes very important. There’s a very large custom board in this table with a PIC24 microcontroller, TLC5955 PWM drivers, and enough IDC headers to seriously reconsider using IDC headers.

Put enough LEDs on something and it’s bound to be cool, but [Jeff] is taking this several steps further with some interesting features. There’s a Bluetooth module for controlling the table with a phone, a VU meter to give the table some audio-based visualizations, and air baths for cleaning the balls; drop a ball down the ‘in’ hole, and it pops out the ‘out’ hole, good as new. If you’ve ever wondered how much effort can go into building a beer pong table, there you go. Video below.

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