Striker Air Hockey
Striker Air hockey is an Arcade style installation game for 2 players built on a custom capacitive touch grid. It showed at alt.ctrl.GDC in 2018, DigiPen PAX booth in 2018, and Seattle Mini Maker Fair 2017 and 2018. We used an Arduino Leonardo, three capacitive touch shields, a table covered in a grid of copper tape, and a projector.
Our touch grid involved a set of copper tape crosses, each connected to a single port of a touch shield, which measured the change in capacitance in the copper-based on the pressure of the hand. There is a growth in capacitance as your hand slides across it, which let us interpolate a position between the 3"x3" grid with a high level of granularity, as long as a full palm was touching the board. Fingers lack the surface area to alter the capacitance of multiple crosses at a time, so they wouldn't give us an X and Y position of activation on the grid.
I joined the team near the end of the project. The team came to me for help the week before they debuted at GDC to help fix their connections and "board design". I re-soldered their entire board and helped fix their connections across the table to allow safe travel to San Francisco. When the team came back they wanted to debut again at Seattle Mini Maker Fair, but the table had a very large latency issue that needed to be solved. I worked on multi-threading the code base in C# to allow for quicker screen adaption for the inputted hardware data, and more optimized data packets to be sent from the Arduino using I2C.
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Here is a link to the article DigiPen wrote about the project:
