bingbong

bing bong !!!!
bing
bong
ping
pong

Inspiration

We were inspired by things ranging from badge hacking to MIDI keyboards to rhythm games. We came into Hack the North with the intention of hacking the PCB badges & making cool hardware stuff.

What it does

Lets you play a rhythm party game with up to 3 other friends using the Hack the North badges as remotes!

How we built it

We started out by using an ESP32-C6 running custom code plugged into a laptop to act as an ESPNow to USB bridge (which allows the badges to have bi-directional communication with the laptop). We then made and flashed fully custom firmware on the PCB hacker badges that also talk over ESPNow and can do things like sending button presses to the receiver as well as receiving LED trigger commands! Because all the data coming into the relay needs to actually go somewhere, we made a server/web app to use all the data and turn it into a fun party/rhythm game where up to 4 players compete to get the highest score.

Challenges we ran into

Getting ESPNow to work properly with the USB relay was trickier than expected since the LCD is quite power hungry and kept on causing issues. Another fun thing we ran into was a badge suddenly getting in a reboot loop/weird state after a new firmware flash, to rule out faulty firmware we flashed the exact same firmware on a different badge which... had exactly the same effect... turns out the issue was not the firmware itself, we just got extremely unlucky and both badges decided to brownout at the exact same time, that was fun to debug!