best way to give away my project??

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rizla420
 
Posts: 332
Joined: Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:03 pm

best way to give away my project??

Post by rizla420 »

Hey Guys/Gals,
A few years ago I wanted to get into electronics and decided to embark on making an electronic beer pong table. Low and behold, I succeeded. My tables were used for a beer pong league and it was very well received. I had grand plans of taking it up a level and start manufacturing/distributing them.

Life got in the way, this was always a part time thing and I just wasnt able to maintain my focus/motivation (worked on it solo for 2+ years..) to keep working on it.
Here's what it is and does:
1.) its a 8x3ft foldable beer pong table.
2.) There are 20 LED's under where all the cups are.
3.) 4 arcade buttons
4.) 4 single digit LED counters (hit tracker)
5.) A restart button
6.) Arduino based board (bet you knew that was coming)
7.) Xbee for wireless communication to a computer 8.) Multiple tables can co-communicate with the computer. I had 8 working on our league nights.
8.) the code on the computer side is a shell script that monitors the serial port for the custome protocol I wrote that writes to a flat file. Then I have a parsing script that reads the flat file and writes the data to a database. I have a front end gui that keeps track of each player/team hits/percentages. It knows which shots you've hit and your hit/miss streaks.

So thats kind of what it does in a nutshell.

Since, as I said earlier, i'm not really doing much with it. I figure it would be a fun project from some undergrads to play with and have fun. Im too lazy to go through the effort of setting up a site and curating this thing.
I have all the Arduino Code, Schematics for printing your own boards, script code, and I have a ton of extra material. i have about 50 tables with precut holes for the plexiglass and the parts that i want to get rid of.

I also have about 70 identical tables to the ones that are used for the electronic version if you're looking for some cheap pong tables for dorm/frat/house.
If anything, I wouldnt mind working with some people on moving it forward, but I have zero motivation to do so.

What do you think the best route for me to set a labor of love project free due to lack of motivation/time/money. Obviously its not cool if someone takes the stuff i've done and trys to profit off it, but if it makes people have fun thats all I want. Enjoy it!

i live in Boston so people close by would be ideal since there could be logistical issues to deal with.

here's an album I just made with some pics: http://imgur.com/a/JAT60

I'll get a video up, so you can see it in action. The code that is running on the table is old and I changed a bunch of stuff to it after that video was made, but it gives you the jist of the operation.

thanks and have a great day.

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