Building a Video Game Interface
So you've built the video game controller with tilt control and want something more? Well, how about an interactive punching bag? That's right. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to interface a punching bag with the boxing game we made in the BoxAholic game tutorial. We will be inserting several pressure sensors inside the skin of a punching bag which will measure where we hit the bag and how hard we hit it. In this example, we will only be using a couple of sensors. But, remember, the more sensors you include, the more accurate your results will be.Parts Needed:
1 Punching Bag
2 FlexiForce Pressure Sensors
1 Green LED (for sensor 1 register)
1 Red LED (for sensor 2 register)
To get started, we need to acquire ourself a punching bag (duh). I chose to go with the free-standing heavy bag from Everlast. It's portable, durable, and easy to work with for applying our sensors.
http://www.everlast.com/freestanding-heavybag.html
Now that we have a bag, we need to get some sensors to measure our punches. For that, I chose the FlexiForce sensor from Parallax. It's basically a small plastic strip with a tiny .375" diameter circle at one end that measures the amount of force applied to it. It has a simple 3-pin connector at the opposite end.
FlexiForce Sensor from Parallax
Part #: 30056
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Sensors/PressureFlexRPM/tabid/177/CategoryID/52/List/0/Level/a/ProductID/384/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName%2cProductName
Note: You can also include things such as the PIR motion sensor, Ping))) Range Finder, QT113-D Touch Sensor, and IR object detection sensors for more interaction and player tracking.