Vectrex Controller Ball Top Prize Giveaway

[playvectrex]

I made a cool ball top for the Vectrex controller, and thought it would be too lame to sell it, so I'd like to give it away as a prize. You can win this cool ball top by submitting a 10,000 point WIN screen picture playing Spike Gets Squished! I have 10 of these, but I'll make more if needed. All I ask in return is that you buy me one or more coffees to help cover the shipping cost. The ball is made of HDPE plastic and the stem is black anodized aluminum. It's already tapped to fit the vectrex joystick. Shown next to one of Tony's copper joystick knobs for size comparison (sorry, I'm out of bananas at the moment).

Preview and download game here

Backstory on the balls used:

These are manufactured 1" diameter semi-translucent HDPE balls (I think typically used for ball valves?). There actually is a really cool story behind these exact balls. They come from an interactive museum quality kinetic sculpture that I helped build for the 2017 Bay Area Maker Faire. The Great Ball Machine, was essentially "the booth" for Particle. We won one or two awards for best something or other as well. My panel was the one all of the way to the left. It has a ball pump, a track selector at the top, each track is lit from below with neopixel strips so the balls glow as they roll down. The balls represent data flowing through the Particle IoT ecosystem. Every machine is network connected to a central display not shown, driven by a RasPi that showed accumulated totals in a fun way. After the faire, these panels went into storage for years before they were finally dismantled and picked for parts. I have most of the good pieces of my panel (ball pump, riser tube, 3D printed micro gear driven wind turbines, laser gate sensors), and all of the balls used on the entire machine. I also have the ball hopper I made that we never ended up using (a 5 gallon bucket that would collect the balls and regulate how many are available to the first panel. They were supposed to be chained together, but to make it easier for guests to interact with them, we made pivoted and made each panel self contained last minute. This project still holds the record for longest time I was awake for, 41 hours. So all of that is to say, these balls are really very special!
www.atlassian.com/blog/software-teams/6-amazing-maker-faire-projects-teams-made