Since nobody's asking, I'll tell you myself: these days I'm building my entry for this year's Trondheim Maker Faire: a just, purely skill based version of the game called Stacker.
Technically speaking it's not very challenging. Instead, I'm aiming for an entertaining contribution to this years faire, it will be on free play, and will reward those go make it to the top by dispensing a candy. Oh, and I must stress that it will be fair - unlike the original, this game won't cheat.
Here's what sparked the idea, a gutted Indiana Jones slot machine that I got my hands on. The 100mm yellow pushbutton was the first part to arrive, and was included in this photo so that "you can picture the rest." ... Well, can you?
I decided to use one big display instead of breaking it into two parts, as the original Indiana Jones game did. My godsend friend Tom Erik volunteered to do the woodwork for me, and he quickly fixed the 7x15 matrix I needed to house the LEDs. I could have opted to use the entire width of the display, and may change this one day.
When the backplate arrived it was time to start the tedious task soldering some of the 200 10mm diffused LEDs I bought off ebay. This may look like a two hour job, but due to my bad back I had to spread it out over a period of three days.
Remember what I said about changing the display? Yeah... no. Not happening.
Anyway, fast forward, and the display is programmed. I used an Arduino for the task, since I'm lazy and didn't bother building a custom board for this job.
Here's the display scrolling some text for testing. I experimented with some additional diffusing by applying a sheet of sandwich paper. It's just to give an idea of what it will look like with a properly frosted glass plate.
The gameplay is nearly finished, and I will post another update once the display is mounted.
Looking great so far! I guess this could also be a nice entry for a wild compo?
friend you could send the sketch, please jnf00@hotmail.com
Hi stacker Clone builder. Where is the update? I can't wait to See this very cool project is finished.
Seimoduino: The clone is finished, and was displayed at Maker Faire 2015. It was a pretty good success, and hundreds of people of all ages played on it. Mostly kids, though, since it dispensed a candy gum every time the player made it to the top (and some kids really got really good at it, they would just casually stroll over to the machine and collect a gum every time they wanted a new one)
Since then it has been in storage collecting dust. Maybe I'll pull it out of storage one of these days.