Machine Divagante

Let yourself wander in light, music and games.

Machine Divagante (Wandering Machine) is a project imagined by digital artist Antonin Fourneau.

This strange gamepad – evoking both the modular synthesizers of the 70s and the arcade game controller – amuses the audience who takes pleasure in handling it. Sometimes a Snake game, other times a sound sequencer, its behaviour can completely change by connecting plugs together through electrical wires in the same way you could change sound modes on old synthesizers… and you can even combine different modes together. This can lead to most unexpected behaviours and really lets you wander in a mixture of amusement, sounds and colors.

Antonin came to us with an already functioning prototype but needed to improve its reliability and strength.
We helped him redesign the hardware and rewrote the code to turn it into a fully functioning product ready to be placed in children’s hands.

Hardware design

One way to robustify the electronics is to get rid of all the wires and design a custom circuit. In this case, we also used the PCB as a structural element of the project since the entire board holding the controls became one big circuit!

Embedded software

What naively seemed an easy project turned out to be much more challenging than expected… but that is what we love !

We had to build all the low level hardware interfaces in such a way that each game level could use them without interfering with the other. The code had also to be made so that the artist could implement new game levels without digging into the complexity.

Of course, we had a lot of fun implementing our version of a Snake, a Simon Game or a color sound sequencer.

Get a look at the full code

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