Ok, this post should have been out for about two month now and MiniPONG had been on two “Exhibitions” so far. I let you down, my dear fellow readers (are there any?), but sometimes it is more important to get the thing done, than talk or write about it. Right? At least that’s how I tick. Despite that, it still is  a little rough around the edges and I was deliberating wether I should post the picture of the inside, as I already got  some harsh comments on it, but see for yourself.

Facts and production notes:

The whole cabin is made out of Forex© – foamed plastic boards 10mm thick (doubled 5mm) and pasted together with an appropriate glue. Wooden texture was printed on adhesive vinyl and scaled down to fit the dimensions. CPO is handcut 2mm alluminium plate brushed afterwards. Decals are standard waterdecals for RC- and modeling. Some clear film of transparent coating protects the decals from being rubbed off.

On the inside we have an Arduino UNO, hooked up to a 9″ black-white TV, two 10K potis, a pushbutton and some wires. The Arduino is fead with a hacked/adjusted version of Arduino-pong from Pete Lamonica.

At this point a big thanks must go to Björn, for helping me with building the cab, Thomas for fixing the code at some point, where I was once again too stupid to see.
Pete Lamonica for the original Arduino based Pong code. And off course Nolan Bushnell, for kickstarting it all. Thanks guys…

Still there are some things that need to be fixed:

- potentionmeters are logarithmic ones, so when your paddle reaches top or bottom, it gets slowed down
- testscreen showing up when turned on or resetted – needs to be removed
- ball angle needs to be resetted after scroing
- potentiometer for volume on TV is broken, only full throttle or nothing to hear…

Mini PONG had been to some shows:

@HomeCon 16 via Homecon.net – here it was still WIP

@VCFe 20121 via Heise

@VFCe 2012 via Load-Magazin

If you guys are interested in the plans and graphics for that project, drop me a line and I will rework them and put’em online.

The arcade bug bit me once more. To be honest it came as a total surprise. While sitting at cAos workshop, which is stuffed with all kinds of electronics, I noticed a tiny TV set. This would be a great screen for a tiny cab, I thought and cAos said that I can have it, “but it is only monochrome”. Puhh, arcade games with no colors are only half the experience or even less. After another beer it struck me: Pong! I took the little thing with me and the same night – although quite drunk – I searched the net for a suitable pong hardware. Mainly ther were two possibilities: go with a “pong on a chip” that was build in the eighties, after pong got big and that is basically the heart of all the pong consoles that were released by countless manufacturers. This would have meant to go the full way of building a pcb as the chip requieres a fair amount of switches and stuff around it.
The other option was to go with an arduino version of it – I still had an UNO lying around. A quick search on google revealed that there are some ports and a TVout lib. The next day I got the missing parts and an hour of soldering and flashing later the familiar screen came to live on the telly.
Here’s a short video of it.

Starting with a scaled down version of the original cab using Forex (gator board) I had some time to wait on matrlerials and spent it with research on how the pong cab looks.

On Youtube I tripped over those tiny cabs and fell in love with them right away.

Victor has done an extremly good job and using an old gba sp keeps down the coasts per unit. However the cabs do all look the same and only distinguish themselves by the artwork. To cut it short: I sat out to build such a tiny Donkey Kong machine, but with the right, scaled down dims of the original cab sticking to the original shape. Here you can see the prototype being put together.

For the final version I plan to cut the parts with a professional milling machine. Hacking the GBA is next. So far I had bad luck and only got AGS-001 models of ebay that sport the far infireior backlight, which is very dark, but for the prototype it will probably be just fine.

Links
Arduino Pong by Pete Lamonica
Arduino TVOut Lib

After toying around with my two roboduinos for some time, I tripped over the camera axe which is a massive tool for triggering cameras via a range of sensors. This thing turned into a professional box and is continuesly updated. As it all started with an arduino I was about to build something similar with one of my boards. About the time I got my first LDR sensor hooked up a friend pointed me to the photoduino project, done by kalanda. I recently ordered one and am half way through with putting it all together. Here are some impressions.

A small test of the 12V piezo buzzer I bought… the force is with me, obviously.

It is not a good sign when I look things over and over again and again and don’t find any bugs. Not that I have trouble to keep the few things in my head, no, now I really suffer from concentration deficits and that is a big indicator for an overdue holiday. Why you ask? I ordered a new Roboduino from China. I couldn’t track any bug and logical solution seemed to order a new one to sort out potential failures on the board.

My inital test with the mutli-color LED failed right away and so I gave it a shot with LCD. Heureka! The LCD works as it is supposed to, showing a “hello world!” and counting the seconds. Mhhh… so why does the LED still not work. Maybe I am too blind to see. So I put the LCD back to the old roboduino and voila, it works too. It looks like I mixed cables or something… anyway, I found a nice little example of how to create custom chars on the LCD and made pixeled the Omnibotlogo. Here’s the link to the tutorial.

LCD check: go… LED check: no go… too stupid to wire three four cables in the right order. I really need some days off…

Searching through ebay I found most of the parts I would need to get my Omnibot running again.

First off all I choose a roboduino board – found one on ebay, origin:China, so keep your fingers crossed that this will hit my doorstep.

Further I got a big 6v motorcycle battery that has the same size as the original from Tomy. Luckily it was already charged and ready to run, as I don’t have a charger right now.

LEDs, Multicolor-LEDs for the eyes – ebay was my friend again.

And a tiny LCD for the front to select programms and as debug screen.

During the last week the majority of the stuff arrived. I don’t know wether the LCD or the Roboduino got lost in our post office. I found the notice that the postman tried to deliver something and I was not at home. In the post office the guy searched for 30 minutes without luck. Now I am waiting for a call… and waiting… and waiting….

Meanwhile I spent some time on the new front panel that would sit in robots balley where the old tape deck and clock was placed. Björn provided me some old forex board (some kind of thin plasic board) that I cut and shaped till it now fits perfectly. I tried to stay close to the original look of the old panel – very 80s and so it fits the overall look.

Considering the eyes I wired up the LEDS . I choose to hook them up parallel and the non-electronic guy that I am, I just burned the first one because of a forgotten resistor. But as the saying goes “Learning by burning” I got it working now. Both eyes are lit up equally and look really great.

I tested the drivetrain and first I was shocked as nothing moved. At work we have a big power supply and in the end it showed up that every motor (Omnibot got two) sucks a full Ampere. No chance for my tiny power supply to comply those needs. The battery, I got now does have 4Ah and this works just fine.

Hopefully the missing parts pop up soon and I can go on.

Back to ebay searching for sensors.