Electro-lum Wire Projects

As time went on, I kept fiddling with the software.. adding little goofy features to it, like wipes and screen effects. Then, one day, a tragedy happened: I blew out the front-end opamps in the microcontroller I was using to drive it! *gasp* So, I needed to buy a new microcontroller.

A friend just happened to be kinda futzing around that day, and had brought with him a single-board computer based on a 6809 microprocessor. Now, the old microcontroller I was using was basically a supercharged PIC16 device.. this was a real CPU, with 32k of real RAM and a ton of address space. I was hooked.. within a few hours, I had the board wired up to the old display, and was able to scroll simple messages across it again!

The extra CPU power afforded to me by having a "real" CPU was.. intoxicating. My mind started swimming with possibilities.. I could even drive.. MORE LEDs! I started wiring up more LEDs, and improving the power supply circuitry. By the time I was done, I had 384 red LEDs, and the scrolling space encompassed a one-inch strip in a circle around the entire hat.

Ah, but.. there was more to come. I quickly started imagining what I could do with an even BIGGER CPU: and then, something came across my desk that would change the entire scope of the project.

A red/green/blue tri-color LED.

It was, at this point, I literally went ape-shit. I ordered 32 tri-color LEDs, and added them in a circle above the red LED strip. I also ordered a number of red/green/yellow LEDs (the exact number fails me at the moment, but it was.. to quote the guy from Digikey, "more than a few handfuls"), and started replacing all the normal "red only" LEDs with the "tri-color" ones.

Very quickly I started running into barriers with my 6809 microcontroller.

Not wanting to spend a lot of time retooling assembly code, I needed an alternative. Before too long, I was ordering a "SCOTTY" 68008-based board, and beginning to rewrite my code to run better on 68k processors. At this point, I had a little help: 68k assembly was a little over my head, so I had a friend help me on some of the code.

By the time I was done, I had a hat that literally almost every square inch was covered in LEDs of some variety. The CPU board went from being something that fit under the top of the hat to a 4" square box with a large ribbon cable leading into the hat. And the power supply? Four huge camcorder battery packs. The entire assembly weighed around 20 pounds.

But, there was literally nothing I couldn't do with it. Each LED could be driven to 8 levels of intensity. While we never got the "yellow" working quite right in the software, the tricolor LEDs worked great... and produced the most brilliant white light when everything was maxed out.. we even overdrove the LEDs for split seconds to get a little more "umf" out of the white. A small microphone was added, and Feedle's Stetson Experience became audio responsive.

FSE made it's debut at Defcon. Unfortunately, it was a quick and short one.. a hardware problem only had the hat up-and-running during the Saturday night dance for about ten minutes. But, what a ten minutes!

Since then, the Stetson has been dragged out a few times, and then it was.. summarily scavanged for parts to make my next abomination, Simon 2ooo. While the hat still exists and could probably be wired back up to the Scotty board, I'm not 100% sure that the world is still ready for Feedle's Stetson Experience...

Simon 2ooo

Simon 2ooo started out just as a way to kind-of pay homage to what I always thought was an awesome game, but needed a little.. more. My experiments with the Stetson gave me the confidance to attempt to update Simon with a whole new look-and-feel.

It started out simply enough. I took an old Simon game, gutted the insides, and started drilling tiny holes to mount LEDs around the buttons. Idea being, "hey, this might work better than the old lamp-underneath-the-plastic look". First red, then green, then yellow, then blue. I then quickly hacked together a real simple version of Simon on the Scotty board, and played it.

It somehow.. wasn't quite as satisfying as the original game.

"Oh, drat," I thought. And then, enters the friend who helped me with FSE. "Needs music," he said.

Suddenly, in a flash, the quasi-modern rendition of Tocatta and Fuge in D Minor from the video game "Gyruss" came in my head. Literally, in that moment of inspiration, the entire game of Simon 2ooo came flooding in. I couldn't write the game dynamics fast enough! Here is a transcription of the scribbled notes..

Game start: beginning crescendo of T&F, level one. Gameplay proceeds as basic Simon, up to a sequence of 10. Level two begins with the second part of T&F, this time you must follow along as Simon leads you in real time, responding quickly. Level three beings with the Fugue portion of T&F: now, you must follow along, but chords are present and you may have to stay depressed on one or two buttons at one. Game ends with closing T&F sequence, rating your performance.

This began the project. I quickly replaced the flashlight lamp assemblies inside, so the lights under the buttons would glow. As part of that, I also replaced the speaker that used to sit at the bottom of the unit (sound up until that point was done by a set of amplified stereo speakers).

Putting the speaker back in was a stroke of genius.

The "Braaaaaaazzz" sound that Simon used to make when you screwed up? Yeah. Apparently, half of what made that sound so classic was it was it reverberated in the old case.

So, Simon 2ooo got no fewer than FIVE Yamaha AY-3-8910 sound chips. I can't tell you how much fun this was to wirewrap.. it took nearly three weeks to build the audio board. Two of my buddies, Paul and Kevin, helped me rip out the audio data from the game Gyruss, which used the same sound chips. One audio line from the Yamaha chips went to drive the speaker in the bottom of Simon 2ooo.

Was Simon 2ooo ever finished? Well, we did get it to a point where it was playable. I was particularly proud of the "attract mode".. Simon would throb the under-button lights with a low rumble coming from its internal speaker, with a spacey tinkle sound coming from the stereo speakers. The music was a perfect fit, especially when Simon's four buttons played four notes in a D minor chord.

Simon 2ooo crashed. A lot. It was almost 80k of assembly code when we started giving up on it. We at one point added a strobe to the bottom that flashed violently when you hit the wrong button. We even hacked in some speech synthesis, but decided that it actually detracted from the game.. the eerieness of just the music alone created quite an atmosphere, especially on the third level when thigns got frantic. We even made it multiplayer: you played each level until you screwed up.. the person who did the best overall won the game.

Sometime when I moved to SF, Simon 2ooo got lost in the shuffle. I was really disappointed, actually.. it was an incredibly fun project and one I would someday like to revitalize. Today, I'd probably use a "real" computer and run a thin Linux kernel, and just use a regular sound card for the audio.

Simon 2ooo was an incredibly ambitious project. Two summers were spent on it. And, I'd do it all over again.. like most of my electronics projects!

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