red bull arcade cabinet electronics
fall 2020 - fall 2021
video demo:
overview
Hired by the Red Bull marketing team, and working with the fabrication team of Ready Set. I teamed up with Mason Mann, and we were tasked with creating a custom fighting game and electronics interface for a custom Red Bull arcade cabinet to be used at e-sports conventions.
It was more of a ‘training’ game then a fighting game. As your character does moves (kick, punch, left, right, jump), your special meter goes up. When you get the correct special combo, a combo animation plays and the arcade cabinet side door pops open to reveal a Red Bull cooler.
technical
final install of system (rev 2)
technical files for the system can be found at the github repo for the project
We used an Intel Nuc running Processing to code the
game, using graphics provided by Red Bull for all the game
assets. Control of the character was via joystick and panel
of 6 buttons. These were wired up to a Teensy 4.0
microcontroller (MCU). The MCU sends button presses to the
computer and when the correct combo is registered in
Processing, the computer will send out a command to the MCU
to fire a pin. The pin is connected to a relay which opens a
solenoid which pops the door open.
rev.2 of the schematic for the MCU interface. Connection to
the computer is made over serial via the USB cable. Internal
pull up resistors are used. The machine is to travel all
over the country, so I added a crowbar protection circuit
with a fuse. In case of any faults, the fuse will blow and
not destroy the electronics.
rev 2 pcb design
rev 1 of the system. Designed the PCB intending on using
a Raspberry Pi for the visuals. We switched to NUC because
of memory problems and needed to use a Teensy MCU to read
button presses and switch the latch:
