I picked up an old lights out game from goodwill to bring back some good memories,and decided that it would make a cool music interface. So I took it apart and am trying to reverse engineer the 5 x 5 matrix of lights and switches so that it can input and output MIDI signals.
Above is a video after I’ve hooked up micro and shift registers and begun to shift data into the lights. As you can see,this little board has many possibilities.
Here is a picture of me desoldering the game’s logic board from the light/button board.
Here is the desoldered board with a new set of header pins that I can breadboard!
I’ll keep you posted when I finally decipher the structure of the buttons and lights,and get some code posted.
–chris
Thanks Sumanth for encouraging me to redo the video,otherwise I would have left a crappy out of focus mess on my blog.
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Hey Chris. Did you get any further on this project? I have a lights out board header-pinned up,but am having trouble figuring out the pin out. ANYTHING you have would be mighty helpful. Thanks.
Hey Dustin,
Thanks for the email,I’m a Purdue grad btw:) Boiler up.
yea I didn’t get much further,I had made a pin out using brute force (with a DMM) and thought I had figured out how to
light up individual lights.
However,I was a little off. It seems that certain pins control regions of the lights,then a group of 5 or so pins together
control those lights within that turned on group. As far as reading the buttons,I haven’t figured that one out.
If I get a chance I’d love to finish this project,as it is sitting in a box somewhere waiting to be finished!
Maybe I can dig up some more info when I get some time and post.
–chris
[...] After a few recent comments,I have revisited my lights out hacking from this post. [...]
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