Retro Controller revisited

Back in April, I wrote about this coffee table that is also a video game controller.

Nintendo Coffee Table Controller

At the time, I thought the woodworking looked pretty cool, but also achievable.  The electronics to make it work would be beyond most of us to bother with (unless you took a real controller apart and stole the circuit board out of it, but even that poses some problems).

However as it happens, I have stumbled across the perfect solution through another website that I frequent, called Kickstarter.com

Kickstarter is a funding website to give inventors a revenue source to get their projects off the ground, and/or into production.  The inventor writes a proposal then seeks funding for that proposal from anyone who reads Kickstarter.  Donations can be as little as $1, right up to $thousands, but the donations come with a reward.  It could be goodwill, or it could be to fund the purchase of prototypes or first production runs of the item.

One of the projects I funded was called MaKey Makey.

MaKey MaKey

To quote from their site:

MaKey MaKey is a printed circuit board with an ATMega32u4 microcontroller running Arduino Leonardo firmware. It uses the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol to communicate with your computer, and it can send keypresses, mouse clicks, and mouse movements. For sensing closed switches on the digital input pins, we use high resistance switching to make it so you can close a switch even through materials like your skin, leaves, and play-doh.

Doesn’t matter how it does it, but the simplest way to look at it is a USB input device for the computer.  By connecting alligator clips to the board, and to a contact device, you can turn pretty much anything into a computer controller.

Pretty much anything.  Even a banana.  A bunch of bananas can become a piano.

The kit can work with play doh switches, even by drawing a controller on paper with a graphite pencil.

PacMan Controller

Given how simple it is to turn so many devices into controllers, the MaKey MaKey is dead easy to incorporate into other items, such as the Nintendo retro controller coffee table.

So if you were interested in creating something like that, and didn’t know how to work out the computer interface, this is the solution!

Want to create a keyboard to reenact Tom Hanks in “Big”?

Big

(Or reenact Homer Simpsons’ reenactment!)

I got the Kickstarter kit with a vague idea that it may be used to create a proximity sensor for the tablesaw or similar.  It could also be used to create a controller for the computer to be able to remotely start and stop the computer recording for podcasting.  There are so many items it could be built into.

I’ll leave it to your imagination!