Today I'm gonna build this quiz game button system. This is gonna have my final version will have six buttons
This is prototype just has four and we do these four buttons is hooked up to their own GPIO
And then I've got an LED in the back which
Corresponds to that button now the idea is is you read a question and then whoever buzzes in first?
their controller will blink and then indicate that they were the first one to buzz in
So it doesn't matter how many others get pushed only one will ever light up, and it'll be the first one it gets pressed
so anyway this is
This prototype is just set up here through this Arduino Uno the final version. I'm going to use these buttons
These are what is known as arcade buttons these do have an LED
Built-in so what's gonna happen is the LED or the button itself is going to flash
I haven't decided if I'm going to put a second LED on the case as well as kind of a master control
Or if just each button is gonna have their own indicator, so anyway. We'll see how the final case comes together
I've got these little project boxes that these buttons are gonna go in
so that they're
Handheld and then each one of them can be a little bit of ways from the controller
So let's go ahead and take a look at the rest of the project
So these are going to be the controllers. This is a little project box. I bought five of them they were about
twelve dollars
I think so a little over a dollar a piece or two dollars a piece and these are pretty inexpensively made too
They're pretty flimsy, but they're gonna work out perfect the back just pops off here, so what these are gonna
Be as the actual hand controller, and there's going to be a button just
Off-center here towards the top and then on the top here there's going to be the lead coming out so you be able to hold
And this actually fits very nicely in your hand
So this is gonna be the button and I've got some different colors
These are arcade buttons and these are not expensive ones either these are
About two dollars a piece as well, so they've got this little collar on them
That screws down now these ones. I bought were they're labeled as 5 volt
LEDs as well so they've got the button on the top and then also there's a
LED inside now interesting ideally I did take these apart even though
I've got some different colors, so here's a red one and a blue one
I was expecting because they're translucent I was expecting the LEDs to
I'll be white but they're not these are blue and these are red and the yellows yellow and green and so on which is kind
Of interesting because they don't shine quite as bright as they would have been if they do used with white
but anyway
It doesn't really matter these as you'll see as I hold this up are much too long for this
So what I'm gonna
Do is I'm gonna trim some of the bottom off of this and bend those leads
And then I'm gonna 3d print a little grommet. That's gonna go on top here a little
Just so that it sits a flush or at least it'll appear as though it sits flush
So they'll be a little washer or whatever you want to call it underneath that and then these are going to
when you push the button
Whoever pushes it first on the controller it will light up
It will actually flash a few times, and then it'll stay lit for a few seconds
And then we'll be able to see who it is
That push first and then this is gonna run using these wires that are made up over
To the controller and now this will be in a separate project box
It's gonna need to be a bigger one than this, but this will sit in a project box
I can't quite decide how I'm gonna do that yet it might be something
That's not clear that you can see the inside and then on the back side
We'll have one of these Arduino UNOs, so this will also be in the box, and then this will connect together on it
Somehow one way or the other one direction
All right
So here's my case
Now as I mentioned earlier the buttons were a little bit too long so what I ended up doing is cutting these?
Plastic pieces off these little ridges and then folded the connectors over
so that they
Didn't protrude out the bottom now that still was a little bit too long so what I needed to do because I wanted to use
The smallest box I could find is I printed this 3d little grommet or washer
And it's black on black so it might be a little bit hard to see here, but you can see it sticks up
but it fits perfectly over that and just makes a nice transition down as part of it so now the
Leads don't stick out the bottom. I've got a little tiny bit of clearance now
I can solder my wires in and then I've got a small hole here where the wire is going to come in so I'm gonna
Feed the wire in I'm gonna go ahead and solder these together so that I've got my switch
On this side my LED on this side, and then I'll be able to
Get that connected up to to my prototype board and we can start
Getting the rest of it working
Alright, so here's my circuit board
It was a little bit more complicated than I thought it was gonna be. I spend a bit of time trying to draft out
Exactly how to run these traces and there just didn't seem to be an easy way
So I went ahead and just started soldering them in I've got a lot of wires that cross over each other
But I'll show you here on the CAD drawing in a minute
Why this got a little bit more complicated.
But the first thing I did is I soldered on these guys here on the bottom
The pins did need to be moved a little bit because they were offset
And so I just had to bend them over a little bit, but that worked out fine
So then I had four two pairs of four on the top and the bottom
Now I do put two resistors in for each of them because there's six controls
And those resistors are pulldown resistors for the switch
for the buttons so that they don't float and then all the way over here on the far right I have the
Positive five volts and the ground so this is gonna be my connector over to the Arduino
So let's take a look at that first
So here's my header connector. I just have a bunch of wires connecting up
And then I have a couple male headers going into these female
DuPont connectors on the bottom here and then on the Arduino itself
I'm running this through pins 0 through 11 because I've got 12 of them
And I just held that in and just soldered those, so it's pretty sturdy
And then I'm gonna run some jumper wires from here to here over to the 5 volts and the ground
I want to get a some type of a
Clear maybe cover for this so that you can kind of see the controls
And we quite decided how I'm gonna do that final setup, but anyway. That's how I hook these two together
Let's take a look at this circuit board a little bit closer
Let's talk about how this is going to get wired up and got a little bit complicated
This is showing the last one. This is the last
Rj45, this is showing switch 5 LED 5 switch 6 in LED 6 and I probably could have wired this up a little bit
Different but I was a little bit of a hurry
So I just kind of put it started putting it together
And then just made the traces work the way I wanted to set this up, and this is maybe not the best design
But I've got my two grounds here, so I've got my two LEDs, and then I've got my two switches
So I have my grounds together
And I have my 5 volts connected together. Now that does mean that these probably aren't going to be
exactly logical when we want to plug them in but I'll show you what I did on that anyway.
The switch is and there's two of them
They're gonna come through they're gonna be pulled to ground using these two hundred ohm resistors
And then they're gonna go over to here
which is switch five and then switch six is gonna pull down to the resistor and
Then going to be switch 6, and then the LEDs are actually just wired straight up
And then they're going to be run to ground when we turn those LEDs on so
No issues with those and then these are going to be pulled high when the switch is pressed
so that's the schematic that I wired up.
The wiring became a little bit complicated, so let's go ahead and take a quick look at that
All right, so here's the bottom side of the circuit board
And then here's the top sign so I tried to run all the traces on the bottom
I did have to have one ground run across the top I could run it on the bottom, but this was just a lot easier
Here are my six resistors two for each of my connectors. Here's those rj45
Well those rj45 the pins weren't perfectly in line
So I did have to bend the back pins in order to get them to fit in here
Just right, so you may not need to tweak those a little bit their turn turns out
They're a little bit offset, so if we look at this we can see it's kind of a little bit of a matted mess
But I do have them a little bit color-coded here
So starting here, and this is going to be the one we were just looking at the switch number six
And this is switch number 5 we see switch number six coming straight down. I'm sorry
This is LED six switch with the orange coming down, and then here's the switch with the white orange
And then that's the resistor on the other side being pulled to ground and then
They're just lined up here on the bottom
This is the positive and I've got that kind of just woven around here, and then up through here
And then up through here, and then the ground is kind of zig and down here
And then this is that trace from the other side
That's being brought down picking up these last two and then along the way picking up those two resistors
So it wasn't too bad. Just a little bit more complicated than what I was anticipating
I'm sure there's a much easier way to run those traces
But anyway that was the way I ended up setting it up, but because running this two rows
Together is so hard to make them go back and forth back and forth I group those grounds and those
Positives together which did mean that I had to wire up my leads just a little bit
Maybe not logical but a little bit different, so let me show you how I wired those up
So here's my final connector here, and you can see I've got them split apart, and I have both wires stuck in there
I don't forget to put the little cover on
Before it makes it a lot easier than trying to sift that through from the other direction
So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my crimper, and we'll go ahead and crimp this
Alright so here. We go so there's my crimper
Give it a good couple squeezes pop that out
Should be a good shape there
Now the last thing on these through-hole ones that we need to do is we need to take a knife
And we just cut these excess off these ones that pass through are just so much easier to use than those other ones
So I would highly recommend you use the passed through ones on these connectors, so there we go so now
I've got a good strong connection and the way these are lined up. They're gonna fit perfectly in with the way
I've got my circuit board laid out so now I can just slide this little
Cover up over it and we're all set I'll go ahead and make the other two all right
So there's all the connectors
They all look at the same, but I've got the nice little boot on them
And then I've got the colors in there to where they're gonna be
and I need to double check on this, but I'm pretty sure it's the the black and the red are the switch and then the
Yellow and green are the LEDs although I might actually have those backwards. I can't remember which direction the plugs go in
Anyway, let's go ahead and get the other ends of these wired up into our switches
Alright, so I have all my connectors made they turned out nice
So they're gonna go in just like that now you'll notice the colors here as we just talked
I've got the black red black red. I wasn't even sure
Exactly which order those were to bring this
Schematic and it makes a little bit more sense so only these plugs these connectors work with these plugs
Is that they alternate back and forth so just purely by coincidence?
the black is going to be the ground on both of these the
Red is going to be the LED and then the green is going to be the 5 volts and then the yellow is going to
Be the other side of the switch
so that actually turned out really well even though it wasn't planned so now that I've got all the connectors made and I've got the
Circuit board all printed or all soldered in and I've got all the wires tested
I did go through each of them with a multimeter make sure I didn't have any shorts, and I did not and I've got the
Arduino board ready to go and I've got the connector here between the two
So the last step is is to finish making the rest of those buttons, and then of those switches
And then go ahead and get those all wired together, so let's take a look at that
All right
There's my button and switch that we talked about earlier
Now this does have the two connectors for the LED here on the top and then on the bottom for the switch now
I don't know exactly because they're not marked which one is positive and which is negative
So an easy way to test that is just with one of these coin cell batteries
So I'm just going to stick it in here, so there we go so now we can see that. It's lit up
and so I now know that the
Top is going to be the positive and the bottom is the negative so that'll help so let's go ahead get the wires run through
Here and let's get it set up. There's the final product. I don't have a case for it. Just yet
I think what I'm gonna
Do is use some standoffs and either one or two pieces of
Lightweight pixie glass so that this can be seen I do kind of like the back of it
I think that's kind of neat, so I'd like to be able to show that off as well
But as you can see I have all three of the plugs hooked in with all six of the controllers now
I only had five boxes
So I ordered another one
So I've only got five of the controllers hooked up
But the other one will get hooked up eventually and then it all does work
Just fine, so let me move this aside, and I'll bring in the buttons, and show you how they turned out
So here's our final cases this one. I've got the back on it, and then this one. I still have it open
So you see how I hook the wires up
I got the
positive and the negative for the LED and then I've got the two switches for the button now before I put these all together and
Put the backs on I'm gonna hold the wires down
I'm gonna put some hot glue on all of these just so that they don't get stressed and come loose on me
And then I'll put a little bit of hot glue on this to keep it from being pulled out and jostle around
But anyway, that's how it all turned out. Let me lay a couple them up here, and we'll just show you how it works
So here's for the five buttons, and I've got the Arduino just off camera there
And so this is how it works each one of them is set up
And I've got loop that's checking to see if any of them are pressed and then whichever ones pressed
It goes ahead and blinks their LEDs so if we press the yellow. You'll see it blinks
I think it's eight times about 75 milliseconds in between each
And then it goes solid for about three and a half seconds before it turns off with the overhead lights on here
It's a little hard to see some of the colors
But they actually show up just fine without the direct light on them, and then they one of them clicks
it doesn't really matter until it resets and
Then you can go ahead and press it again, so it makes it be a lot of fun
I think kids are going to enjoy it as well
I'll probably carry it around with me at some of the events so the project turned out really really well
I think it'd be interesting to also on the main unit here to have some LEDs or
Something to also be further reinforcement the other thing I was thinking of doing is using some of those
LED strips in order to kind of show maybe a
Pattern going back and forth while you're waiting for somebody to press the button and then have the whole thing turn whatever color it is
That got pressed so in that case it would all turn blue or in this case it would all turn red
So I think there's some interesting things you can do there's definitely enough GPIO ports to do that
Even with the six buttons that I've got programmed up here. But anyway, that's the final project. I think it turned out really really well
I'm gonna give it a case set up here for this and
I might shoot a little bit more video and put that in the thumbnail
But if not I mean can imagine what that's gonna look like
Well there you go, there's the completed project
One thing I wanted to note is that you don't need to use all six controllers
You can actually just plug two or four in and it doesn't even matter what order you plug them in.
Because of their the way the program set up it'll just go ahead and use whichever ones are plugged in so if you wanted to
Do a two person or a four-person game that also will work just fine
So anyway, I think that's all I've got for this project
I'll put some information in the link below if you want to if you have any questions or something shoot me a message
If you like the video or the project either give it a thumbs up or a heart depending on wherever you saw that and let
Me know if you have any questions