arduino pong
Well, I’ve gathered all my spare change laying around the house and purchased an Arduino board last week. For anyone that doesn’t know what Arduino is, it is a micro controller board that is based around c/java versus the standard stamp boards that are in basic.
These boards are around 35-40 dollars pre-assembled and are used with the ATMega328 chip. This is a significant decrease in the cost of the stamp controllers or the Lego Mindstorm junk. That stuff is just too expensive to get started with and Arduino bridges that price gap by removing some of the flare without removing any of the power. Take a look at their website with plenty of comprehensive information at http://www.arduino.cc.
The other great benefit of this stuff versus alot of the others is it’s all open source. The software, the hardware, the design information, everything is open for research and quite easy to find! Within a few days (with help of my father who has been doing this stuff for quite a few years with the stamp controllers), I had managed to not only start prototyping boards, but get a proof of concept on how I can make lots of these very quickly and cheaply by ordering just a few parts online.
I wont claim I haven’t run into a multitude of snags and bumps along the way, and after purchasing a large supply of resistors, diodes, capacitors, led’s and miscellaneous other parts (I already had solder and a fairly nice starter iron and electronics kit), I found myself about a hundred dollars in the hole.
What did I get for my hundred dollars? PONG! I’m still trying to move it from a breadboard to a soldered down version, but after 2 weeks, I think I’ve got the whole thing working just about right.
This is still very messy and I’m trying to get the whole thing on one board, but am still awaiting my boot loader firmware upload device so i can save this to one of my spare chips and get my current board working towards the next project.
I tried my damnedest to make a pair of controllers out of some pieces of wood (which I carved out with a damn razor. I don’t suggest doing it with a razor if you dont have to).
The code can be found at http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1187659197. This is pretty much just sample code at this point and actually comes with the device software. I figured I would also show the layout of the board. I used express PCB to make a visual representation of how the controller is mounted to the board and how power goes into and out of it.
There is still much to do and much to test before I get this thing fully completed, but it works! I plugged it into the TV and there we have pong. I don’t have a video camera, but essentially, this is how it looks right out of the “box”: Arduino pong.
Once I get this part completed, I’m going to try to improve upon the code to make the game look more attractive in game. Also, the whole thing is off screen by just a little bit, for some reason. I plan to look into that as well.