Overview

I built a Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) pad with an Arduino Leonardo. The pad acts as a keyboard, so it works as a controller for DDR games on a computer.

The idea came from Mel Huang’s DIY DDR tutorial on Medium.

How I built it

The pad is MDF board with copper tape and aluminum bars. Each arrow (up, down, left, right) is a sensor wired to the Arduino Leonardo.
The Leonardo can act as a USB keyboard, so the code reads the sensors and sends key presses with the Keyboard.h library.
I played a lot of songs on it to test it and tuned the input until it felt responsive.

Results

I made two pads so two people could play against each other. In fall 2019 we set them up in the Engineering Building, and professors and students played on them between classes. 🪩🕺

Demo

Videos

Presentation

You can read the slides below or download the PDF.