Sing-Pong (Arduino/Unity project)

 

From the start, my goal was to create a voice-controlled game, of course within the limits of Arduino and its microphone component. Sing-Pong is mostly just like Pong, except the paddle is controlled by voice. Players are to vocalize into a microphone (made of a wooden spoon), with the height of the pitch being analogous to the altitude of the paddle.

The aesthetic of the Unity application and the paper casing for the Arduino board are specifically inspired by the very early home consoles of that era (mid-late 70's, early 80's), with the orange casing, button panel, and logo design being a mixture of specifically (pictured left to right) the Atari console and Nintendo's Color TV-Game 15.

While the application and casing design were relatively simple to put into practice, the actual gameplay has (and still does) face some issues. Through either the wiring being too loose, the microphone component itself being internally damaged, or some other likely physical factor, the readings of the microphone (or at least the resulting Fast Fourier Transform) often seem to act unpredictably. Admittedly, traces of this can even be seen in the video demo. As a slight workaround to this, adjustable parameters for min/max frequency and min amplitude are available in the Unity editor.

Circuit Schematic

Link to Code

GitHub link

Citations (also on above repo)

• Read Arduino output asynchronously https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/12/01/asynchronous-serial-communication/
• Format score with leading spaces https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string.format
• Score font: Bitfont 5x3 by Matt LaGrandeur https://www.mattlag.com/bitfonts/
• In-class Arduino Mic FFT example
• In-class Arduino-Unity communication exercises