Beer pong is the go-to game at house or frat parties. It's the age old tradition of trying to get the other team to drink as much gross, cheap beer as possible. The game is fairly simple to play, but the rules can be a little tricky to learn. These are some basic tips on how to play beer pong like a pong master, or at least how to appear like. Cup Pong is an iMessage (Apple's messaging platform) game available through GamePigeon, a free add-on you can download through the iMessage version of the App Store. Once you install GamePigeon, you can use it to start a real-time digital game of virtual Cup Pong with anyone else who uses iMessage.
Wouldn’t it be nice if beer pong could somehow get easier the more you drink? You know, so you can drink more? [Ty Palowski] has made it so with automated, mind-controlled beer pong.
[Ty] started by making a beer pong table that moves the cups back and forth at both ends. An Arduino Nano controls a stepper that controls a slider, and the cups move with the slider through the magic of magnets. The mind control part came cheaper than you might think. Back in 2009, Mattel released a game called Mind Flex that involves an EEG headset and using brain waves to guide a foam ball on a stream of air through a little obstacle course. These headsets are available for about $12 on ebay, or at least they were before this post went up.
[Ty] cracked open the headset added an HC-06 Bluetooth module to talk to the Arduino. It’s using a program called Brainwave OSC to get the raw data from the headset and break it into levels of concentration and relaxation. The Arduino program monitors the attention levels, and when a certain threshold of focus is reached, it moves the cups back and forth at a predetermined speed ranging from 1 to an impossible-looking 10. Check out the two videos after the break. The first one covers the making of the the automatic beer pong part, and the second is where [Ty] adds mind control.
We’ve seen a different headset — the hacker-friendly NeuroSky Mindwave — pop up a few times. Here’s one that’s been hacked to induce lucid dreaming.
Via r/duino
If there’s one game that deserves to be overengineered with hundreds of LEDs, sensors, and electronic modules, it’s beer pong. [Jeff] has created the most ostentatious beer pong table we’ve ever seen. It’s just shy of playing beer pong on a single gigantic LED display, and boy, does it look good.
The table includes a 32×12 grid of LEDs in the center of the table, with 10 pods for Solo cups at each end of the table. These pods have 20 RGB LEDs each and infrared sensors that react to a cup being placed on them. The outer edge of the table has 12 LED rings for spectators, giving this beer pong table 1122 total LEDs on 608 individual channels.
Game Pigeon Cup Pong Hack
With that many LEDs, how to drive all of them becomes very important. There’s a very large custom board in this table with a PIC24 microcontroller, TLC5955 PWM drivers, and enough IDC headers to seriously reconsider using IDC headers.
Play Beer Pong Online Game
Put enough LEDs on something and it’s bound to be cool, but [Jeff] is taking this several steps further with some interesting features. There’s a Bluetooth module for controlling the table with a phone, a VU meter to give the table some audio-based visualizations, and air baths for cleaning the balls; drop a ball down the ‘in’ hole, and it pops out the ‘out’ hole, good as new. If you’ve ever wondered how much effort can go into building a beer pong table, there you go. Video below.