Buttons!

Rather than reinvent the wheel, or the button I should say, Activate generously provided us with a number of their buttons to use in our game. Activate has a well engineered solution that they use in their existing game rooms. Each room has one of these buttons to click for confirmation if the player would like to advance to the next level or replay a level if they failed. A number of rooms also use these buttons as gameplay elements, Push and Press exclusively consists of these buttons mounted around the room, other games such as Laser and Trench use them to confirm the players have made it to the other side of the room while Grid, Megagrid, and Hide use them to add additional tasks and challenges to the game room.

Source: Activate's Push Room Video Demo

With the buttons in hand we set to work reverse engineering them to understand how they work. They consist of a robust switch and addressable LEDs.

I developed a class which will enable us to define button objects. Each button object can be assigned a callback function which will be called when the button is pressed.

Each class also has lighting controls. The user can assign predefined colors to the different LED rings on the button, there is also functionality to set the button to a single color as well as the option to turn off all the lights.

Below is a demo of the Button in action.

We also ran a test confirming multiple buttons could be run off of one Raspberry Pi without issue.