I built this crazy Banana Pong thing with a MaKey MaKey for the Art Jamboree that Art Milwaukee does… here’s a time lapse video from the event…
posts tagged with the keyword ‘mkemakerspace’
2013.04.05
2013.03.31
My last MaKey MaKey project was the Apple Piano, which I created for Milwaukee Makerspace‘s participation in previous Art Jamboree event that Art Milwaukee puts on…
The Apple Piano was about sound, as that’s been something I’ve been toying with in Processing for some time. With another Art Jamboree on the horizon, I set my sights on a classic video game… and bananas.
As usual, when I need a nice piece of clip art I head to OpenClipArt.org. This time I found a sweet looking bunch of bananas. I only needed one banana so a quick edit in Inkscape got me what I needed.
Wait, but why did I need these banana images again? Because a game of pong is pretty boring… unless it’s Milwaukee Makerspace Banana Pong! Controlled by real bananas.
I found a nice one-player Pong sketch written in Processing, but it was your typical vertical paddle movement, and I needed a horizontal paddle movement. I ended up rewriting the game a bit to turn it all 90 degrees so the left/right of the banana controller would make more sense.
(Disclaimer: If you know anything about me, you know that I believe in crediting people for their work. We’ve got a problem this time. I went through so many Pong sketches that somehow I lost track of the one I started with. I’ve searched for more than an hour and could not find my starting codebase! If I do find it, I’ll update this post to point to it. On with the story!)
Once I got the game working, I needed to add some fitting graphics, so what better than a take on the Milwaukee Makerspace logo with… bananas. (We’ve got a history of weird/wacky logos.)
One thing I learned was that bananas are not very tough! If you let people pound on your bananas for a while they get really mushy. I should have brought a lot more spares so I could swap them out more often.
Here’s a few photos from the event:
2012.11.25
Here’s a quick time-lapse video from the 2012 Holiday Make-A-Thon that Milwaukee Makerspace does in cooperation with Bucketworks. We’ve been doing it for 3 years now, and Bucketworks has been doing it on their own even longer.
It seems like a lot more hackerspaces are doing these type of events this year, which is awesome, and there’s even a nice name for it now: Hack Friday. In my mind, part of belonging to a makerspace/hackerspace is the love of creating things, sharing that with others, especially on a day that has become completely over the top in regards to consumerism. Our mission is plain and simple: Instead of buying useless crap on “Black Friday” join us and we’ll help you make something for the holidays.
I figured it was also a good time to test out the time lapse capabilities of the GoPro Hero3. I have a workflow in place that includes taking still images with the intervalometer and then combining the frames into a video, and then resizing and cropping the video to the correct proportions. It seems to work. Oh, and the camera motion near the end is actually the gaff tape giving out before the camera fell face-down. Enjoy!
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