1D pong electronics
2,673 views · Published 21 August 2012 · 2:42 · Indexed 3 October 2026
Channel: Jason Hotchkiss · 2012 · Science & Technology
The electronics behind the 1D pong game in my previous clip.... I am using a 5m addressable RGB strip from GL-Leds in China (their "intelligent LED strip") which is based on on the ydsco sd600 controller chip. I needed to make my own Arduino library for it (https://github.com/hotchk155/Arduino-Library-For-SD600-Controller) but then it was plain sailing to make the game. I found some nice footswitches intended for tattoo machines, and made up a couple of direct drive LED boards for the scoreboard, using shift regs and uln2803 transistor arrays. The sound is from the Arduino Tone library, using a simple LM386 audio amp to drive the speaker. One big problem I had with the strip was getting the red LEDs to go off! I spent ages on this one issue, thinking it was my code, till I saw on someones blog (I can't find it now - but thankyou whoever you are!) that there is an inherent issue with 12V strips using the SD600 controller. The solution is to run the strip at 10V. I am using an adjustable switching regulator to let me reduce the voltage till the red LEDs are just off. 1D PONG will be appearing at the Brighton Mini Maker Faire on September 8th (http://www.makerfairebrighton.com/)
