Do-it-yourself projects and technology updates

DIY Laser pong

Here is an amazing project done as a senior design over at Cornell University in Electrical Engineering. I wish I would have had a chance to design something cool like this as my senior design.

Anyway, these guys made a wall pong laser game. They have a laser platform that moves, and projects a ball on any surface. A chalkboard works best. All you do is draw your boundaries, and then as you turn on your machine. You set the boundaries, and then play away.



You can see above the platform which moves and projects the laser. This project uses an Atmega32 microcontroller for the game. It uses a rotating mirror that is mounted slightly off axis, which makes the reflected laser beam a small circle for the ball. The position of the laser is controlled using two stepper motors to control the X-axis, and then the Y-axis. The paddles are simply a row of Photodetectors that detect when the laser hits. Note that the gears are all designed and cut using an epilog laser cutter, and 3mm and 6mm acrylic. I could think of some things I could do if I had one of those

Wall of Pong is a fast-moving, interactive, laser-based pong game playable on any flat surface.

The system uses a digitally controlled laser projection platform to draw a pong ball onto any flat surface. This allows for a large playing area that can be set up almost anywhere. Hand held paddles with embedded sensors are given to each player. The real life paddles increases the interactivity of the game and makes it an enjoyable and dynamic derivative of the original PONG arcade game.

See this cool project here. You have to view the video.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.