Category Archives: pong

Hackaday Links: February 5, 2017

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A lot of people around here got their start in electronics with guitar pedals. This means soldering crappy old transistors to crappy old diodes and fawning over your tonez, d00d.  Prototyping guitar pedals isn’t easy, though, and now there’s a CrowdSupply project to make it easier The FX Development Board is just that — a few 1/4″ jacks, knobs, pots, power supply, and a gigantic footswitch to make prototyping guitar pedals and other musical paraphernalia easy. Think of it as a much more feature-packed Beavis Board that’s still significantly cheaper.

How do Communicators in Star Trek work? Nobody knows. Why …read more

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VGA Monitor Becomes Drawing Toy

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We hate to break it to [Rob Cai], but he’s built a VGA drawing toy, not an Etch-a-Sketch. How do we know? Simple, Etch-a-Sketch is a registered trademark. Regardless, his project shows how an Arduino can drive a VGA monitor using the VGAx library. Sure, you can only do four colors with a 120×60 resolution, but on the other hand, it requires almost no hardware other than the Arduino (you do need four resistors).

The hardware includes two pots and with the right firmware, it can also play pong, if you don’t want to give bent your artistic side. You …read more

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Giant-Scale Physical Pong

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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 …read more

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EMF Fire Pong

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One of the installations that consistently drew a large crowd after dark at EMF Camp 2016 was a game. This wasn’t a conventional computer game though, instead it was a line of gas jets along which a pair of players had to bat a jet of flame between them at ever-increasing speed until one player missed the return. This was the Fire Pong game created by members of Nottingham Hackspace, and though there seems to have been no online write-up of it as yet they have posted enough pictures of its build for us to deduce something of its construction. …read more

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