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MAKE pal John Maushammer (who reverse engineered the firmware in all three Pure Digital disposable cameras and figured out how to connect them to home computers) sent in this amazing pong watch! He writes -
"I loved the idea behind the Pong Clock and I've wanted to make my own watch for a while now... combine those two things, and I've got a start at the Pong Watch. This is just an electrical prototype - the hard part will be making the watch case and then squeezing all the electronics in there. The display is a small (1.2") 96x64 yellow-and-white OLED display. OLEDs are neat because only consume power proportional to the number of pixels that are turned on -- for a game like pong, that's a relatively small 1-2% of the display, so the power requirements are pretty small. Plus, the high contrast looks great with a game like this. I haven't worked out the power budget in detail yet, but hopefully I can get a day's use out of the watch, and then recharge the battery each night. The charger would also automatically set the time, so there will be no need for buttons on the watch."
Why isn't the score actually the time? The right player could win all the time (once per minute) and the left player could win once per hour. The numbers don't seem to make any sense in the video.
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Poopy - The score will be the time. I wanted to make sure all the digits looked good and that the score routines worked, so for testing I made it increment faster than usual.
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I'd buy one of these. Pretty cool.
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I've made a version of pong clock for pocket pc, just need to get around to releasing it :(
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Why, oh why, haven't Morcheeba, Coderman, Ladyada, and Benheck all been put on retainer by the cable companies to make American Monster Space Busters really cool? It's time the world paid homage to it's celebrity-grade hardware hackers.
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I wish there was a version for the Palm, or the Fossil Palm watch.
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Is there a flash viewer for palm these days? If so, you may be able to run the screensaver located here:
http://www.burovormkrijgers.nl/zip/pong_clock.zip
It's written in flash.
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Now that's darn cool! Hmmm... maybe I'll work on sketches of what the watch case would look like.
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Now that's darn cool! Hmmm... maybe I'll work on sketches of what the watch case would look like.
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Definitely inspired by the Pong Clock dashboard widget.
http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=1452
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Ian12 - yep, I've got that widget on my mac & it's great. But, I ordered the OLED before I downloaded the clock. I don't like how the paddles move, though -- they accelerate too fast and then land on the right spot too early. The screen is just about the right size, though!
I did the math last night, and I can use a smaller-than-expected (and much cheaper) battery and still get a decent 25 hours of operation. So, it looks like I can fit it into a really small case :-) I'm redoing the code for a new (smaller) microcontroller, and am working on the two power supplies (3.0v and 12v).
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I'd like to see more info on how he made it. a Pong watch may not be the best thing, but if you could go a tad bit bigger, you could easily make a fun portable game.
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Ok, I've got some build details up on my web page:
http://www.maushammer.com/systems/Watch/Build%20Log/Build%20Log.html
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