Planet Arduino

Video games are popular because they provide a clear and reliable loop of effort and reward. If you smash the baddie, you get experience; get enough experience and you level up. But real life isn’t like that and there is little direct correlation between effort and reward, which is dissatisfying. Gamification techniques address that by providing game-like rewards in real life. If you want to gamify physical speed and dexterity, then the DIY Cobra reflex coach may be the ticket.

Cobra works a lot like the consumer training devices on the market. It has several big buttons that you must push as quickly as possible after they light up. And it provides gamification by quantifying your performance. Get a little bit faster and you’ll immediately be rewarded with objective feedback on your enhanced speed. That gives you incentive to keep practicing and over time you agility should grow. Continue and you may just become the next Bruce Lee.

This is a compact unit, so the enclosure is 3D-printable and can be mounted to a wall or tree. Inside the housing there is a massive PCB, complete with cobra head artwork. That PCB contains an Arduino UNO Rev3 board, a 16×2 character LCD screen, and a small piezo buzzer. Adafruit NeoPixels illuminate the buttons, indicating which one you should strike at any given moment. Those buttons are actually capacitive touch pads, so you don’t have to hit them hard— even a light tap will register.

The post Channel your inner Bruce Lee with this DIY reflex coach appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Video games are popular because they provide a clear and reliable loop of effort and reward. If you smash the baddie, you get experience; get enough experience and you level up. But real life isn’t like that and there is little direct correlation between effort and reward, which is dissatisfying. Gamification techniques address that by providing game-like rewards in real life. If you want to gamify physical speed and dexterity, then the DIY Cobra reflex coach may be the ticket.

Cobra works a lot like the consumer training devices on the market. It has several big buttons that you must push as quickly as possible after they light up. And it provides gamification by quantifying your performance. Get a little bit faster and you’ll immediately be rewarded with objective feedback on your enhanced speed. That gives you incentive to keep practicing and over time you agility should grow. Continue and you may just become the next Bruce Lee.

This is a compact unit, so the enclosure is 3D-printable and can be mounted to a wall or tree. Inside the housing there is a massive PCB, complete with cobra head artwork. That PCB contains an Arduino UNO Rev3 board, a 16×2 character LCD screen, and a small piezo buzzer. Adafruit NeoPixels illuminate the buttons, indicating which one you should strike at any given moment. Those buttons are actually capacitive touch pads, so you don’t have to hit them hard— even a light tap will register.

The post Channel your inner Bruce Lee with this DIY reflex coach appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Summer is upon us. The Lightgame Project is a multiplayer reaction time based game built around the Arduino. It’s a perfect rainy day project for those restless kids (and adults!). Designed by two undergraduate students [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] for a semester long project, all the hard work has already been done for you.

There are tons of reasons we love games that you can build yourself. For one, it’s an amazing way to get children interested in hobby electronics, making, and hacking. Especially when they can play the game with (and show off to) their friends. Another reason is that it is a perfect way to share your project with friends and family, showcasing what you have been learning. The game is based on your reaction time and whether or not you press your button when another players color is shown. The project is built around two Arduinos connected via I2C. The master handles the mechanics of the game, while the slave handles the TFT LCD and playing music through a buzzer.

I2C is a great communication protocol to be familiar with and this is a great project to give it a try. [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] did a great job writing up their post, plus they included all the code and schematics needed to build your own. It would be great to see more university professors foster open source hardware and software with their students. A special thanks goes out to [Dr. Dasygenis] for submitting his student’s work to us!