NES Controller Interface for Etch A Sketch

Arduino Fun & Games

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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November 26th, 2011 6

YouTuber Alpinedelta32 created this simple but fun retro remix by combining a Nintendo Entertainment System controller with an Etch A Sketch. The drawing toy’s knobs are rotated by 12 volt stepper motors and they’re controlled with the d-pad of the NES controller. Behind the scenes he has an Arduino for motor control and a computer power supply to provide the 12 volts needed by the steppers. I’m guessing the next logical step is to rig the start button to flip the Etch A Sketch over and shake away the drawing. [via Engadget]

Justin Forposting says:

November 26th, 2011 at 10:48 pm

Neat idea. Needs a cheat code: up – up, down-down, left-right B = draw Mario

John Wood says:

November 28th, 2011 at 9:02 am

* UUDDLRLRBA

kevin huff says:

December 2nd, 2011 at 9:54 am

a thought on a future upgrade, if you didn’t already add it… An SD card that stored a recording of each drawing session would allow the user to keep sesions stored like pages in a notebook, although the re-drawing would take a while :)