estimated reading time: 2 min

Flappy Bird is one of the most interesting titles in video game history. Not because of the gameplay, which is pretty basic and wasn’t at all groundbreaking at the time of release in 2013, but because of the subsequent controversies. By 2014, it had become the most downloaded free game on both the iOS and Android app stores. But its creator, Dong Nguyen, ended up removing the game from those stores, because he felt that it was too addictive and that it was a detriment to society. Now Engineezy has brought it back in the form of a real-life Flappy Bird game.

It didn’t take Nguyen very long to create Flappy Bird—reportedly just a handful of days. But Engineezy’s real-life version is much, much more complicated and took a lot more time. It is a physical game, in which the player controls an actual, tangible bird that flies between endless pipes on a revolving mechanism. As the bird goes further and further without a collision, the score continues to increase. There are even sound effects!

To make that all happen, Engineezy had to come up with several subsystems: something to move the bird, something to move the pipes around and around, something to adjust the heights of the pipes, something to detect collisions, and something to keep score.

The pipes ride on a chain mechanism, similar to a chainsaw, driven by a stepper motor. Conductive traces on that mechanism’s track send power to each pipe carrier, so servo motors can raise and lower the pipes. Each has its own “EEZYmoove” control board with a dedicated microcontroller development board. It uses a rotary encoder to monitor the position of each pipe and can set a new height before the pipe enters the “game screen” area.

The bird moves up and down on another servo-driven mechanism, which Engineezy designed specifically to be a bit unwieldy to match how the bird flies in the Flappy Bird game. It has a spring and an extended arm to create “floppiness” in the motion. The bird and the pipes move across a printed “screen” with the familiar cloudy backdrop.

In the center of that screen is a split-flap display for showing the score. To determine the score, Engineezy had to find a way for the game to check if the bird passes a pipe or collides with it. He achieved that in a very fun and clever way: by making the bird physically fall of its mount in the event of a collision. Magnets lightly hold it in place and if it falls off, a pogo pin circuit breaks and signals to the controller that the game is over.

The final trick was sound effects and instead of playing audio files, Engineezy added actual chimes. As the bird passes a pipe, a striker taps the chimes and produces a great sound effect.

All that was left was for Engineezy to challenge a friend to a gaming contest. We’ll let you watch the video to see who won.

estimated reading time: 1 min

Today in old school nostalgia our tipster [Clint Jay] wrote in to let us know about this rotary dial.

If you’re a young whippersnapper you might never have seen a rotary dial. These things were commonly used on telephones back in the day, and they were notoriously slow to use. The way they work is that they generate a number of pulses corresponding to the number you want to dial in. One pulse for 1, two pulses for 2, and so on, up to nine pulses for 9, then ten pulses for 0.

We see circuits like this here at Hackaday from time to time. In fact, commonly we see them implemented as USB keyboards, such as in Rotary Dial Becomes USB Keyboard and Rotary Dialer Becomes Numeric Keypad.

One thing that makes this particular project different from the ones we’ve seen before is that it doesn’t require a microcontroller. That said, our hacker [Mousa] shows us how to interface this dial with an Arduino, along with sample code, if that’s something you’d like to do. The schematic for the project shows how to connect the rotary dial (salvaged from an old telephone) to both a 7-segment display and a collection of ten LEDs.

The project write-up includes links to the PCB design files. The guts of the project are a 4017 decade counter and a 4026 7-segment display adapter. Good, honest, old school digital logic.

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estimated reading time: 1 min

Got some spare filament and looking to build a guitar you can truly call your own? [The 3D Print Zone] has created a modular 3D printable guitar system that lets you easily mix and match different components for the ultimate in customization.

The build is based around a central core, which combines the pickups, bridge, and neck into one solid unit. This is really the heart of the guitar, containing all the pieces that need to be in precise alignment to get those strings vibrating precisely in tune. The core then mounts to a printed outer body via mating slots and rails, which in the main demo is made to look like a Les Paul-style design. This outer body also hosts the volume, tone, and pickup controls. Output from the pickups travels to the controls in the outer body via a set of metallic contacts.

What’s cool about this build is that the sky really is the limit for your creativity. As the video below demonstrates, the main build looks like a Les Paul. But, armed with the right CAD software, you can really make a guitar that looks like whatever you want, while the 3D printer does all the hard work of making it a reality. The files to print the guitar, along with the pickups and other components, are available as kits—but there’s also nothing stopping you from working up your own printed guitar design from scratch, either.

We’ve seen some other great 3D printed guitars before, too.

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