What started as a pile of parts and my sister telling me her toddler loves to flip switches, has now turned into a fully interactive activity table made using an Arduino Mega 2560, a number of switch, and some LEDs.

The steering wheel was more of an after-thought since my nephew likes to play on my dad’s tractor.

I wanted a fun theme. Nothing is more fun than electrical engineering. So I had my mother paint the activity table with electronics parts and concepts. Like Ohms law, nothing is more fun than Ohms law.

I also added some felt around the door hinges to reduce the risk of pinched fingers. And I also added a small magnetic white board.

My design has a 5 position selector switch that can switch the different modes of operation.

  • Piano – This mode turns the 8 push buttons into a keyboard. Following the C Major scale from C to C. The white knob determines the octave the note is played in.
  • Gate Logic – This mode follows the graphics painted on the panel. XOR, NAND, OR, and AND gates. This is great for understanding how logic gates work.
  • Memory Game – The memory game flashes a pattern on the LEDs and the goal is to remember the pattern and press the buttons in the same order that they appeared.
  • Reflex Game – The reflex game is about turning the LEDs off as they come on, using the white knob, you can change the difficulty (how fast they appear)
  • Random Flashing Mode – This mode is just to flash all the lights randomly.

Those aren’t the only modes however; The big red switch at the top puts the activity table into song mode. When in song mode, the selector switch switches which songs are played using pulsed width modulation. Songs include:

  • Mary Had A Little Lamb
  • Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
  • She’ll Be Coming Around The Mountain
  • Classical Gas

I could have used an Arduino Uno or other lower IO device and used shift registers, but that would add much more complexity. So I opted for using an Arduino with a lot of IO out of the box. The Mega 2560. This worked great for the shear number of buttons and LEDs.

  • Input: 16 Pins
    • 8x Push Buttons
    • 1x Analog Potentiometer
    • 1x Step Push Button
    • 5x Selector Knob
    • 1x Music Mode Select
  • Output: 13
    • 12x LEDs
    • 1x Speaker Output

I would certainly say that if Corpsy enjoys playing with this activity table, then my nephew will.