tele pong – IR pong controller.

March 9th, 2008 admin

This assignment required the creation of a networked pong controller. The primary goal of this project was to explore the functionality of the ‘lantronix xport’ serial to ethernet module.

My implementation utilized the infrared signals emitted from an old television remote control in order produce the necessary controls required to participate in a class wide networked pong tournament. The pong controller was required to have the following functionality: connect to the pong server, disconnect form the pong server, move left, and move right.

Using a very simple infrared sensor I was able to use the relationship between the intensity of the infrared signal and its distance to the sensor in order to generate bi-directional instructions. By decreasing the distance between the emitter and the sensor the paddle would move to the left once a predetermined threshold was crossed. The same logic was used in the opposite case where once the signal fell below the defined threshold (due to increasing the distance to the sensor) the paddle would receive instructions to move to the right. A momentary switch was also used to connect and disconnect the receiver component from the server. The arduino code that defines the complete functionality of this unit can be found here.

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