tl;dr: I made 3D printed, bluetooth game show buzzers for playing The Voice at home, powered by Adafruit Circuit Playground Bluefruit boards and a laptop. Bringing Reality TV to Reality If you ask me, combining a makeshift karaoke setup, cheap beer, and good friends all but guarantees a fun night. Ok who am I kidding, my college days are well behind me – decent beer. Anyway, toss in some random swivel chairs and before you know it, you’re playing your own version of The Voice™ wishing you had some big red buttons to smash. That’s the origin story of this Continue Reading
leds
Light Up Bean Bag Toss
A while ago I got my hands on some scrap photoelectric sensors from work. The defects were only cosmetic, so I mounted a pair of them to a flimsy bean bag toss (aka cornhole) set I had made a couple months before. I drilled 12 small holes in a circle around the main hole and filled them with LEDs. I added a little box with some batteries and a couple 555 timer circuits so that the LEDs would flash for a few seconds whenever a bag went through the hole. The effect was kinda cool considering it was mostly just Continue Reading
LED Matrix
Not sure why, but I’ve always thought making a huge LED audio spectrum analyzer would be cool. With that goal in mind, I picked up some dot matrix LED blocks and started breadboarding. This project started long before the days of Neopixels, so the most advanced tech on my PCB is slew of LM317s for current limiting and a handful of high-current shift registers for multiplexing. As you can see, there was a pretty bad ghosting effect as the letters scroll by. It took me a while to figure out that the display needed to be left completely blank for Continue Reading