Pong on a Raspberry PI

As a self-study project I experimented to create a Pong game + slide shown on a Raspberry PI with Tkinter, GPIO and physical buttons.

Material list

• Raspberry PI, of course ;-)
• SD card with Raspberry Pi OS
• 3 boxes with on/off button like this one
• Breadboard for the first experimental setup
  • Breakout connector like this one
  • Or to help identify the GPIO pins you can also use RasPiO® Portsplus board
• Electrical cable with three wires
• Some breadboard cables
• Box to protect the Raspberry PI
• If you want easy control a bluetooth keyboard and/or Wifi dongle

Assembling

• Connect the electric cables to the push buttons.
• Optionally, run a first test with a breadboard before assembling in the box.
• Integrate the cables in the box.
• Connect to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry PI.

Source code

I started with an existing Python pong game from Matt Pugh.

It needed a lot of tweening to make it multiplayer, keep scores and configure it to run smoothly on the PI. It was also extended to have a main page with advertisements and where additional games can be added, you know once, when I have time… ;-)
For the slideshow, I extended the code from Stack exchange.

My complete source can be found here on GitHub.

Some additional Python libaries need to be installed

• pip install RPi.GPIO
• pip install keyboard
• pip install pillow
• sudo apt-get install python-imaging-tk

Tips & tricks

I tried out many different methods to get rid of the screensaver, but the only good solution turned out to be:

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

If you want to get rid of the mouse pointer, follow the step-by-step on this site.