Raspberry Pi - Playing Pong With Crane Remotes

Here’s a project that will leave you scratching your head! Ever wonder what it would be like to play Pong using those big heavy duty shop crane controllers? No? We built it for the company that manufacturers them.

The project has a Raspberry Pi 2 at the heart with a Pong game written in Python. The fun part was connecting the controllers.

You will find more information about this and other projects here

- wireless crane remote and receivers

- Raspberry Pi

- ATMEGA328

- Plastic enclosure

Each controller is wireless with a separate control box, so we were able to modify the control box to avoid making any changes to the actual controller. But since we wanted to use the joysticks, we still had to use an additional ATMEG328 microcontroller to perform the analog (pwm signal) to digital conversion for the Pi — it wasn’t exactly plug and play. The ATMEGA is connected via the UART with the Raspberry Pi.

In the first step we've realized the system on a bread board.

In the second step we created a pcb. It fits exactely in a plastic housing. This gives our project a professional look.