basic electronics (or is it?) --> carnival project

[Gert]

Hi,

I want to build a "carnival race light" game. It's game where a series of lamps come on alternately and randomly, that you have to stop by hitting a button at the right time, at which point the light stays on.

I have some basic electricity skills, sadly enough not that many electronic skills. I have been searching online to find an answer my "how to" and preferably find a complete guide on how to make one. (In fact, I can't even find what the game is called, "carnival lights" is the closest I've gotten)

I would like to make it "vintage", so with regular lights, not LED (or maybe I could just put some vintage covers on LED lights, that would work too. They have to be bright enough to distinctively see by daylight, as the game will be played outdoors during our yearly carnival.

I would also like to be able to control the speed of the alterations with like, say a volume control button.

Anyone who can help me with this, which parts do I need, and how to build it?

p.s. it would also be nice if a beep sound plays on everytime a different light comes on. But that's just jazzing it up,... If I get the basics I'll probably find my way from there and play "pimp my vintage carnival lights game" by myself.

thanks already!

 

[GreenGiant]

You can do that with what is called a "chaser circuit" most of the designs you will find will be called "LED Chaser Circuit" or "555 Chaser Circuit" either is fine, you would just need to use FET's (most likely, maybe a regular NPN/PNP gate would work for low power lights and lower cost) in place of the LED's

The stopping and polling whether it lands on the right one, that part will make things a little more difficult.

The alternative is to make the whole thing with a microcontroller, this would be quite easyto accomplish, though it would require some hardware and some programming.

Are you going to want it to spit out tickets and such or just light up when it hits certain ones?
Also how many lights were you hoping to use for the circle?

 

[Fish4Fun]

Gert,

Lots of approaches to this, but all pretty much require a fair background in electronics/logic. While discreet logic ICs can certainly provide a solution, you should probably consider using a microcontroller. The Arduino family of prototyping boards are designed specifically for making microcontrollers accessible to novices, and are dirt cheap with a virtually unlimited potential. That being said, I doubt you will complete your project for a carnival scheduled in 2013.

Regardless of your approach to the logic side, this is a two part project: 1) Logic 2) Driver. The logic portion can/should be worked out on a piece of paper. Once the logic is complete, you can then begin to simulate, then prototype. For prototyping I would suggest using small LEDs that can be directly driven by logic level signals. Once you have the logic portion completed AND debugged, you can begin building a driver to use whatever type bulbs you want. From here you would simply replace the various Logic level LEDs with a driver and a bulb of your choosing. (I would suggest some of the readily available high output LEDs, but if you prefer incandescent bulbs that is certainly an option.)

To proceed you will need to learn about Boolean Logic, Clock Sources, Inputs, Outputs, and some type of Latch, register or accumulator. These are the building blocks of digital signals (and microcontrollers/microprocessors). A simple example might be a two-way light switch:

SW1     SW2    Light
 H       L      On
 H       H      Off
 L       L      Off
 L       H      On

This is equivalent to the boolean logic operand XOR (Exclusive Or), and can be expressed mathematically as Light = SW1 XOR SW2. You should map the entire logic of your device as such. Once this is done, I would suggest using a programming language (perhaps Visual Basic) to simulate your logic before proceeding to physical prototyping. In a high-level language like VB, you can create "virtual" buttons and lights and test/debug your logic. Once the "simulation" is complete, then you can decide if you want to build the logic from discrete logic ICs, or simply use a microcontroller. But in all cases, you need to begin by defining mathematically exactly what you want to achieve.

From your description, it is unclear what the point of the game is. Is this an "electronic slot machine" where some combination of lights is favored over other combinations? Is this more like electronic dice where the user "rolls" by pressing a button? If it has any similarity to a gambling game, then I feel confident someone else has already worked out both the logic and a circuit for you, which would fundamentally change the complexity of your project.

Fish

 

[Laplace]

What sort of 'randomness' are you looking for? There are a number of possibilities:

TRULY RANDOM: The state of each lamp is independent. Each lamp has its own random generator, such as a noise diode & comparator & latch circuit. A 555 timer would periodically clock all the latch circuits.

PSEUDO RANDOM: Use a shift register pseudo-random sequence generator. Connect each register in sequence with its corresponding light to see the random pattern travel through the light array, or scramble the connections so there is no discernible path through the light array. The random sequence generator can be implemented in discrete digital logic or in microcontroller software.

PATTERN SEQUENCE: Use this for more control of the light display, e.g., always having only 7 of 32 lamps activated; just which of the 7 lamps are ON changes at each step of the sequence. Store something like a thousand patterns in PROM and use a counter on the address lines to step through the pattern sequence. This also can be implemented in discrete digital logic or in microcontroller software.

 

[KJ6EAD]

You may be looking for a "reaction speed test" type of circuit.