Simon is an old school electronic game of memory skill invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison, with software programming by Lenny Cope.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
According to Wikipedia, the majority of the Assembly language for the game was written by Dr. Charles Kapps, who taught computer science at Temple University.
Recently, a Maker named Ben North and his 7-year-old daughter designed a Simon-playing robot that is capable of beating the classic game.
As HackADay’s Brian Benchoff reports, North uses a key chain version of the game that is much smaller and easier to work with in terms of automatically sensing lights and pushing buttons.
“The arms are made from LEGO bricks, held up with rubber bands and actuated with two servos mounted on a polycarbonate cutting board,” he explained.
“To detect Simon’s lights, Ben connected four phototransistors to an Arduino Duemilanove (Atmel ATmega328 MCU). The Arduino records the pattern of lights on the Simon and activates the Lego arms in response to that pattern.”
As North notes, the Simon-playing robot, while fully functional, does have a number of limitations.
“This is not an industrial-strength robot. It’s quite fussy about ambient light, even with the calibration. This explains the slightly grainy videos, as they had to be shot without proper lighting,” he added.
“Once or twice, the finger-pulling elastic bands slipped, meaning a finger didn’t completely press its button and the game was lost. Also, I think the robot would have been better with some flashing lights.”
We think the robot is impressive, nevertheless!
Interested in learning more about the Simon-playing robot? You can check out the project’s official page here.
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