We run a weekly 3pm – 5:30pm Thursday drop-in tinker sessions at Zeal West, Henderson — a youth space where young people meet, hang out, and learn new skills.

These sessions led to a two-day E-Waste Hackathon, exploring the design challenge: “How can we take the Zeal kaupapa to the streets?”

We came up with the concept of the: The Mobile E-Waste Arcade.
Together, we built three, fully functional, mobile arcade machines into broken supermarket trolleys and powered by salvaged electronics:
1. Musical Foosball Table — powered by batteries from old alarm systems, a windows 7 laptop, hacked USB keyboard, foosball table and more.
2. Mobile Retro Arcade Emulator — computer speakers and amplifier, retro game emulator, LCD screen, SLA batteries and more.
3. Mobile Electric Drum Kit

Early drawing of the Mobile Retro Arcade Emulator

Final version of the Retro Arcade Emulator on the right. Musical Foosball table on the left!

User testing: Taking Street fighter to the streets.

Close up: Musical Foosball Table

We also prototyped a 20-player Street Fighter game. Usually the game involves two virtual characters fighting each other, controlled by two humans. In our version, we have two teams of ten humans. Each team controls one player on screen. Each team member is responsible for a single move that the virtual character can make (jump, duck, block, punch, kick etc)

Multiplayer Street Fighter: We also made out own input devices. In this case, hitting the various conductive metal objects with metal spoons activated the virtual characters moves.

The hackathon wrapped up with public play-testing of the arcade down the road at West Wave Pool and Leisure Centre. We were thrilled that members of the public joined us to play with the machines we’d built.

A competitive game of musical foosball about to kickoff!

Close up of the input device for the Musical Foosball Table. Using a hacked computer keyboard, each of the miniature soccer players on the foosball table activates a key on the keyboard E.G. Player 1 is ‘F’, Player 2 is ‘G’ etc. We then use SoundPlant to associate the key-presses with musical sounds. The players are wrapped in tinfoil and play on a copper “pitch”. The ball is a stainless steel ball bearing meaning that electrical contact is made between the pitch and the player when the ball is kicked. The method of transforming an old computer keyboard into a modular / experimental input device was taught to us by our dear friend and collaborator Chris Berthelsen!

We’re working on a full writeup of the event and technical details of the projects which we’ll share soon.

Our thanks go to:

• Pia Sutherland – talented designer, currently studying a BSc/BFA, UoA who assisted at the event and oversaw construction of the foosball table
• Matua B (Ben Hulme) – Zeal West, for leading the retro arcade build
• Pito and Chris Foster-Winder – Zeal West support
• Century Yuasa Batteries, Onehunga – for donating used SLA batteries to power our arcade (too weak to power their original application but perfect for powering our mobile arcade).
• Monaghan Sheetmetals, Avondale – Aluminium and Copper offcuts to fabricate parts of our foosball table.
• Waiōrea Community Recycling Centre – for materials
• Kristian Larsen – local artist and sound maker who co-created a musical foosball soundtrack
• DaHua 大华超市 Supermarket Henderson – Donated broken trolleys for us to build into.