Funky Hardware Beats: The story of dance-mat.js
summary
Builds a two‑player DDR mat by painting electrodes on a yoga mat, wiring a BeConductive hat to a Raspberry Pi OTG gadget, and sending 8‑byte USB HID reports over USB to StepMania. Uses Node.js, a Uint8Array buffer and the linux-device npm to write keystroke packets to the Pi’s HID file. Reveals practical numbers (six key bytes + two modifier bytes), problems (paint cracks when rolled, painted “cables” fail), fixes (croco‑clips and soldered wires) and a working demo that registers keystrokes and scores—functional but fragile, often yielding modest scores (around D).
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and inspiration
- 3:13Music games and DDR
- 7:13Introducing the dancat.js project
- 10:06Turning Raspberry Pi into a keyboard
- 13:21Sending keystrokes over USB
- 16:32Testing the USB keyboard output
- 19:07Painting the dance mat
- 20:55Lessons learned and improvements
- 22:21Demo and final thoughts
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