Asteroids Controller with Raspberry Pi

Posted on December 27, 2013

In addition to running this website, your humble blog host likes to tinker.

This past summer I had access to a laser cutter, CNC router, and some creative technology experts in New York — so I decided to learn some new tools and make a desktop Atari Asteroids controller running an arcade machine emulator (MAME) on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer. All you need to provide is power in and audio/video out.

Read the full write-up on my personal site for a walkthrough of the fabrication, plus design files.

And for anyone looking to build an Asteroids control panel, here’s the image I traced from an original:

asteroids_controls.pdf (editable PDF)
asteroids_controls_cs3.ai (Illustrator file)

Asteroids Control Art

Human Asteroids

Posted on May 30, 2013

Just when we thought there couldn’t be anything cooler in the world of Asteroids, there’s this:

It’s Human Asteroids, a project by Two Bit Circus for their proposed STEAM Carnival, designed to turn kids on to Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.

Human Asteroids uses a Microsoft Kinect to track the player in a rolling chair, who becomes the spaceship. Asteroids are projected on the ground with lasers, and the player fires with a smartphone.

The player in the video is Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.

The STEAM Carnival has a Kickstarter campaign going until midnight on June 2, 2013. If successful (and at the time of writing, they’re close), they plan to take the Carnival on the road at several major west coast American cities.

[UPDATE] This story has been making the rounds today, and Two Bit Circus has just passed its fundraising goal of $100,000, with two days still to go.

Asteroid Belt

Posted on May 16, 2013

AsteroidBelt-670

Makers, behold: the Asteroid Belt.

An Australian known as cunning_fellow has made an LCD belt buckle that plays “Rock Blaster” (wink, wink). The whole project is extremely well-documented on instructables.com.

In the FAQs, he writes:

Q: It costs more to build than a RasPi and only runs at 16Mhz. Why did you bother?
A: If you don’t understand already there is little I can do to help you.

Read all about it at http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Asteroid-Belt/

Thanks to our friends at Adafruit for tipping us off.

See more Asteroids fashion in the archives.

AsteroidBelt-outofcase

Asteroids Mini

Posted on March 10, 2013

Here’s the goal: having an Asteroids arcade machine at home, with authentic electronics and true vector display, but which isn’t the size of a refrigerator. Jürgen Müller in Hamburg, Germany, has built just that.

His half-scale Asteroids cabinet uses an original Asteroids game PCB and 9″ vector monitor from a broken Vectrex, housed in a custom-built cabinet. He also built a custom XY driver circuit to bring the Vectrex display up to the drawing speed required by Asteroids.

The project is well-documented on Müller’s website: http://www.e-basteln.de/asteroids/asteroids_intro.html