Raspberry Pi Roundup - A Harry Potter duelling system, a space-age retro console and a 3D-printed retro console

Potter Duel

Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced decided that Google’s voice recognition service wasn’t being used for the right stuff. So, he hooked up a Raspberry Pi to the service for a far more magical mission. Wizard Analogue No-Magic Dueling Simulator (W.A.N.D.S.) is Harry Potter-meets-Laser-Tag – the Pi detects the speaking of ‘spells’ and then triggers an infra-red tipped wand. The infra-red signal is picked up by an opposing player’s receiver and then an Arduino hooked up to a T.E.N.S. machine delivers light electrical shocks to various parts of their body. This gives a palpable sense of being ‘hit’ without doing any damage. There is a bit of a delay while the voice commands are piped to the cloud and received back again, making it not-particularly-instant, but it’s still pretty cool! See it in action in the video below:

Space-Age Console

Pete Dearing wanted to do build something for his kids, and it had to have buttons. A lot of buttons! He purchased plans for a space-themed bunk bed and then proceeded to create a console with dozens of buttons, switches, toggles and other controls. The build, which took approximately 100 hours, mostly comprised sheets of MDF and runs on 12V power. The power is cut when the children are in bed, or when they aren’t actively playing, and most of the controls actually do something like controlling lights, sounds and meters. All the sound effects are controlled by a Raspberry Pi which is buried in the console. You can read more about the project, and see more photos of the build, over at Make.

Retro 3D print

Matthias Ladkau has created a portable retro gaming machine using a Raspberry Pi 3 and a custom-designed 3D-printed case. He’s called it the Spieljunge. It runs RetroPie to emulate loads of gaming machines and features a variety of small 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf buttons. He’s written the whole project up here and published the 3D parts here.