What do you do if you have some spare Adafruit LED Matrix boards lying about and you have a hankering to let loose on some old-school pong? You do what Eduardo Zola (Zola Labs) did and you create your own LED-based portable Pong game. Zola’s New Pong v2.0 is based off his previous ‘Little Pong’ LED game but houses the electronics in a small compact plastic housing.
The New Pong design features a pair of Adafruit small 1.2-inch 8 X 8 LED Matrix boards with an I2C Backpack for the game’s ‘screen’. The matrices are connected to a MAX7219 display driver (16 pins) to control the lot of 128 individual LEDs, which is in-turn connected to an Arduino MEGA 2560 microcontroller that controls the show. A side-mounted potentiometer controls the LED ‘paddle’ for fast-paced Pong madness. A 12V battery powers the game but it is unknown as to how long it can run before needing replaced. A small speaker provides the 8-bit retro sound, giving the game a classic overall appeal, making for a good time on the go!
Check out This project and a slew of others at Eduardo Zola’s project site.
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