This is a brief review of the improved version of an already existing DIY contribution made by Digital Art and Technology, where a Pong game was designed with the help of Arduino and a Potentiometer. When Ferran tried his hands on the game he was quite impressed. As a result, he decided to follow the basic concept of the same project and took up the task to bring a change in the older version so as to allow the setup to be used for a 2-player pong game. The major difference is that here he used two potentiometers instead of one. 

 

 

 

Before proceeding with the details of this DIY project, it is important to note that the original one already contained the code as well as the instructables for the game. The setup is quite simple which requires a potentiometer, Arduino board, prototyping breadboard, a USB cable and a processing programming tool. This tool is required to run the game. Even though a potentiometer is a common term, it was usually used in old days to measure the voltage in a circuit. Later, it got replaced by moving coils and digital volt meters. 

 

In the first version, blue, black and red wires were connected to the A0, GND and 5V pins of the Arduino respectively. Then these wires were attached to the potentiometer in the same sequence. Contrary to this, Ferran made a slight change and just connected the A0 and A1 analog pins of the Arduino with each of the potentiometer. He wrote a code to be loaded on the Arduino and then modified the code used in the original project which was loaded to the processing IDE. 

 

In order to establish a communication between the Arduino and his laptop, he made use of Linux serial port /dev/ttyACMO. Now when the play button was pressed, he was able to control both the pong bats with the help of the two potentiometers. Thus a minor change in the coding allowed him to design a two player pong game without much complexity. 

 

Here is the video which clearly explains the mechanism of the project, whereby a 2 player pong game is being played by regulating the knobs of the potentiometers to the left and right directions. If you intend to make an attempt on this DIY Arduino project, refer to the link mentioned below in order to access all the coding details of designing this pong game.