Planet Arduino

Go to any arcade and the air hockey table will probably be one of the most popular games they have. Everyone loves air hockey, but a lot of people don’t want to go to an arcade just to play. If you fall into that category, then you can follow LloydB’s Instructables guide to make your own scorekeeping air hockey table.

The key to air hockey is right there in the name: air. All of those little holes in the table’s surface allow air flow. That creates an air cushion for the puck and paddles to float on, reducing friction and enabling knuckle-shattering gameplay. For that to work, the table needs something pushing at least as much air as escapes through the holes. This table isn’t very big, so it doesn’t need a high volume of air. Three 12V PC fans are enough. They push air into a chamber beneath the hole-filled top board. Power for the fans comes from a battery holder with 8 AA batteries.

Those batteries also power the Arduino UNO Rev3 that handles the scorekeeping, which is the other important part of air hockey. Each goal chute has a laser break-beam sensor to detect when the puck comes shooting in. The Arduino then updates the scores shown on a 16×2 LCD screen. The Arduino will also emit a tone through a buzzer. That increases in pitch with each point, so players get audible cues as the game progresses. 

The post This small scorekeeping air hockey game brings the arcade classic to your tabletop appeared first on Arduino Blog.

If you are an American, you’d probably think of [Silas Hansen’s] project as “air soccer” but most people will prefer air football. Either way, it is like air hockey but more of a football field feel. The project looks great — if you saw this on the shelves of the local toy store, you wouldn’t think anything of it. You can see a video of the game in action, below.

Unsurprisingly, the brains of the game are an Arduino. The case looks good thanks to laser cutting and 3D printing. A Roland printer produced the stickers that really dress the case up, but you could find another artistic way to do the decoration.

You could probably pull this off without all the fancy fabrication gear, but hand drilling all those air holes would be a pain. The air is from a 3,000 RPM brushless fan and a pair of line trackers are repurposed to sense when the puck — er, ball — reach the goals. A touch display handles the scorekeeping.

Overall, a great-looking project and one of those things that doesn’t use anything too high-tech, but still looks great and seems to work well.

We’ve seen hockey tables before, of course. If you are too antisocial to have an opponent, you can always build one.

If you’d like to bring the air hockey arcade experience home with you, then look no further than this project by Kousheek Chakraborty and Satya Schiavina, or ‘Technovation.’ 

Cleverly, the scaled-down game table uses a household vacuum cleaner blower attachment to provide air pressure, sending little jets of air through a grid of laser-cut holes on the acrylic playing surface.

LED lights embedded in the sides add a bit more excitement to the build, and points are tallied with an Arduino Uno-based LCD score display. A pair of buttons are used to register a points for either player, hopefully eliminating arguments over who is ahead as the game progresses!

Many of us have considered buying an air hockey table, but are put off by the price. And even if the money is there, those things take up a lot of space. How often are you really going to use it?

This DIY air hockey table is the answer. It’s big enough to be fun, but small and light enough to easily stow away in the off-season. At ~$50, it’s a cheap build, provided you have a vacuum cleaner that can switch to blower mode. The strikers, goals, corner guards, and scoreboard enclosure are all 3D-printed, while the pucks and playfield are laser-cut acrylic. [Technovation] glued acrylic feet to the strikers to help them last longer.

The scoreboard is an Arduino Uno plus an LCD that changes color to match the current winner. Scoring must be entered manually with button presses, but we think it would be fairly easy to detect a puck in the goal with a force or weight sensor or something. For now, the RGB LEDs around the edge are controlled separately with a remote. The ultimate goal is to make the Arduino do it. Shoot past the break and cross-check it out.

Already have a table? Had it so long, no one will play you anymore? Build yourself a robotic opponent.

Air hockey is a classic arcade game consisting of two players, two paddles, a puck, and a low-friction table. But what happens if you don’t have an opponent? If you’re Jose Julio, you build a robotic one out of 3D printer parts.

An updated version of his earlier design from 2014, Julio upgraded the Air Hockey Robot’s original camera and vision system to a smartphone for its eyes and brain. Other components include an Arduino, an ESP8266-based shield, NEMA 17 stepper motors, stepper motor drivers, as well as some belts, bearings, rods, and a few more 3D-printed pieces.

As you can see in Julio’s video below, the robot moves along two different axes with a paddle to cover its half of the table. An Android phone running the Air Hockey Robot EVO app monitors the playing surface, and makes real-time decisions by tracking the puck’s location and predicting its trajectories. It even comes complete with sound effects!

The smartphone’s camera is looking at the playing court. The camera’s captured data is processed in real-time by the smartphone. Detecting the position of the puck and the “pusher robot” (and according to the current location of all the elements on the court), your smartphone makes decisions and commands the robot what to do via Wi-Fi.

Your smartphone will become an augmented reality device, showing predicted trajectories and position of all the objects involved in this game.

Want your own? Julio has made both the instructions and code available to everyone.

(Nice find, Hackaday!)