The Pi Pong clock
First of all, thank you to everybody who sponsored us on yesterday’s London to Cambridge bike ride in support of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. We got to the end unscathed, Eben “won” by sprinting away from the rest of the pack about five miles out at Duxford, and many cereal bars and bananas were consumed. If you’d still like to sponsor us, you can do so at JustGiving.
Eben (can’t sing in tune, makes a mean risotto), James Adams (director of hardware, brews beer in his garage, welds things) and Emma (office manager, PhD in entomology, knows more about ladybirds than anyone else alive, good at punching). Click to sponsor.
Back to the matter at hand. We found a Pong clock on YouTube, powered (of course) by a Raspberry Pi. It made us laugh. One side wins once an hour, the other once a minute: the result is a clock that’s weirdly compelling to watch.
Don Clark, the Mind Behind, has made the code available at his Bitbucket account: it’s written in Python, and you’ll need PyGame to run it; Don was using Raspbian as his OS.
Let us know if you incorporate a Pi into your home decoration scheme. We thought this was a super-cute way to tell the time.
32 comments
Dutch_Master
Liz, you need to put up the correct video ;-)
Dutch_Master
Right, solved :)
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Congratulations you guys! Hope you raised lots of money and I wish I could of been there!
That Pong clock is too cool. Too cool. Might just make one myself me thinks!
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Martin OHanlon
I love the pypong clock… Very imaginative.
Krishna
That’s cool idea.
brox
Excellent idea)
Zak
Originally, I thought pong clock would some how involve dropping ping pong balls…
colin allison
Liz,
For some reason, I cannot see any video, just a large white space.
Colin
liz
Odd – you’re the second person today who it’s not displaying properly for. Have you tried clearing your cache?
colin allison
Yes – just cleared it again and still no video. It has never been visible for since the piece was put up.
I am running on WIN 7 64 bit, and FF v.22
colin allison
Just tried on IE v10 and no video, but a big black square this time. No run radio button to click either.
Colin
colin allison
Maybe you could give a clickable link too?
brox
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4_0Fo_beaU
If it does not work on youtube, something with your computer is really wrong)
colin allison
Thanks Brox – you’re a star!
Since this all happened, the problem cleared. I had tried clearing cache numerous times, disabling adblock and the other add-on I have installed, Disconnect. None of these solved it. I even rebooted with all these things done. So, after re-enabling my add-ons, and browsing elsewhere for a while, I came back and the videos are now visible. Another MS undocumented feature?
Colin
Jim Manley
Hilarious! It takes longer to get to the current time than I would prefer and sometimes lags as much as a minute behind, but is entertaining.
For code providers, if you’re going to post source, please include a .zip file containing all of the files/directories with as short a direct URL as possible so that everything can be downloaded with a single wget. Lightweight Pi browsers don’t display typical browser-based source management site pages properly (especially those with gobs of Javascript) and don’t react to button presses correctly. Heavyweight browsers that do allow proper display and operation can barely run on the Pi.
Don Clark
Thanks for the suggestion. I added a link to the zip in the YouTube video.
colin allison
Just noticed that the video in the Carputer piece has disappeared too. Strange!
Colin
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Seems to be working perfectly for everyone running Chrome… Give that a try?
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Juan
This idea has actually been available as a screensaver for a few years now. The screensaver was very buggy though!
I still like it :)
AndrewS
It also tends to crop up quite often on the HackADay site ;-)
http://hackaday.com/?s=pong+clock
Jonathan
Weird. My display has been fine. Windows Vista Dell inspiron 530 using newest bleeding edge of Google Chrome.
Don Clark
Thanks for the comments.
It definitely wasn’t an original idea of mine to build a clock around pong. I saw one on the web 5 or 6 years ago that used a microprocessor. Implementing that would have taken too long for me, using the Rpi I was able to do this over a weekend.
If anyone builds one please let me know. My email address is in the source code.
David Booth
If Eben broke away from the pack to “win” at a charity cycle event, does that mean he is competitive, just a keen cyclist or could smell the beer at the finish line? ;-)
liz
All three, I fear.
Giles
Memo to self: make sure new monitor can’t tip over when attacked by cat.
Robert_M
Eben seems to have his
Jason Statham “Transporter” persona down pat. Not a cyclist to be trifled with.
RandomDude
Haha, I been thinking he looks like Jason for a while xD. Just goes to show when RaspberryPi Magic ain’t happening, they are still being heroes for other charities =)
Carolon Ulrich
I love it!! :)
?
Doesn’t work for me, it only shows 00:00?! And when playing 01:00 and so on, but not correct time?!
don clark
Is the time set on your pi?
The score initially starts at 00:00. At first the left hand player will score to increase the score until it matches the hour. Then the right hand player.
?
Wahoo! When waiting for matching, it runs fine. Using it now under debian wheezy on my laptop. Thank you. :-)
duck jane
Jason Statham on the left :O
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