BongoPong
view the flickr photo gallery : read the build journal : email the creator
What is BongoPong?
BongoPong is an entirely new (I think) form of interactive gaming.
When I first set out to learn electronics several months ago, the first kit that I assembled was the Velleman Pong kit, available at ThinkGeek and numerous other online retailers.
I knew right away that some day I would find a way to mod this kit and make it my own. A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article on HackADay about a clever hacker who had modified his pong kit to receive input from his flexed arm muscles.
This hack got me thinking about different ways that I could interface with my pong game, but every idea seemed overdone and not very original. Friday afternoon I was driving home from the store when I got the idea of controlling the game using an Indo board (also known as a Bongo board, hence the name).
You can peep the inaugural video here. Wordpress didn’t want to let me embed multiple videos in one page.
I started work right away on the project. I quickly found out that Indo boards do not come cheap, with prices starting around $80, so I decided to make my own. For $6 I was able to get a short length of 5″ PVC pipe and a piece of wood (which I later replaced with the skateboard deck seen in the video below), and some small metal tubes to use for the tilt activated switches. The total expenditure was less than $20 for enough equipment to make a board for each player.
Here is a look at the tubes that I used to create the tilt switches, and a video of the switches on the workbench.
You can see a video of them at the workbench here.
Everything else just kind of came together with some tinkering.
