Fire Pong (Rule Zero) - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

this is fire pong also known as rule zero which is a project that we made for EMF Camp 2016 and the basic idea is it's like a game of pong a one-dimensional game of pong um but with fire rather than pixels Ru zero over hack bace is do not be on fire and it basically means look after your own safety and look after the safety of other people around you rule zero the game has an asterisk next to it which basically says more of a guideline each of the players has one of these bats you to get the timing quite right in order to bounce the flame back to the other end and if you don't get the timing right then the big puffer goes off first one to three so first player is randomized oh after the first player [Music] alternates oh [Laughter] no gold [Music] TCH oh no you won I won the match by getting first person to three points and as a reward I get a victory swipe which means I can waft my bat and then lots of fire happens that is the most fun bit in the bats are wiimotes um which we can they're just unceremoniously taped in so as you as you swing the bat the weote sends a signal to raspberry pie that's in a little control box which currently in the greenhouse at the moment this is the main control box which has the pie in it it has a 12volt power supply which runs everything um and it has some rs45 serial controllers um and a bunch of relays and stuff all of this goes out through these connectors to various other parts of the system and they're all controlled using arduinos so we got a whole bunch of Arduino Pro minis quite a few of which died in the making of this project and they receive serial data from the Raspberry Pi and convert it into some sort of events that they're supposed to do so we have a display event which can make things appear on the display panel so this is a matrix display which was made by another hackspace member at little and it just receives an rs45 um packet in a proprietary protocol that I wrote and display some text so the pi controls the kind of high level stuff and then all the individual devices actually do the sort of turning on and off of solenoids and Sparks and things like that in one of these little control boxes you can see see a Arduino Pro Mini there and it's connected to this solid control board that's the rs45 level converter and the uino just turns on off these solenoids which will in turn make sort of sparks happen and gas come out one of the things we had to work out how to do was how to uh light the gas so we experimented with things like barbecue lighters but they weren't really that effective then I came across these things £164 from eBay you put 5 volts in you get a few thousand volts out and then another challenge we had was how to design a spark gap we need we needed some insulators so we got a couple of ceramic tubes from fuses with screws in the ends and a machined aluminium block which just mounts to the right position there's a bit of discussion about what would happen when you won wasn't there so that was when the victory swipe came wasn't it to to that's right to encourage people to want to want to win and to have that extra go and make more fire when you win yeah initially it was just kind of if you lost then there was a big puff um but yeah we realized that would be an incentive to just miss so you got more fire um so the victory swipe was a kind of an incentive to actually try to win the game and it really worked I mean people yeah people really enjoyed the victory swipe I think the other two canisters are actually butane cylinders uh which were discarded and um they act kind of like a um gas capacitor they're called accumulators and they store gas close to where it comes out so that it can come out quickly right