Simple Simon’s SparkFun Mod

To get the LEDs in the right order,   just test them with a 5v supply and a 10k resistor to determine which color is which.   Then go look at the original Simon pic and place them in the right order.   It’s Green, Red, Blue, Yellow going clockwise and starting at the upper left.

I’d love it if they were marked on the leads with a Sharpie by the nice folks at SparkFun, hint, hint.   But if not, no problem – it’s easy to check the color.   Oh, unless you never learned that an LED needs to be biased by a resistor.   In that case, your standard 5v 1A power supply would have smoked those nice LEDs in about a millisecond.

Next, in order to get the batteries on the bottom we must do something about that big ass buzzer stuck right in the middle of the left battery’s way.   We tried breaking it apart but the components were pretty sensitive inside.   Ours still worked so if you were really gung-ho I’m sure you could do it, but we ended up just replacing it with a smaller buzzer connected via a couple of wires.   Hot glue holds down the fort.   Here are the pics of the new component layout.

Fig 4 – Top of Modified Simon Kit                     Fig 5 – Bottom of Modified Simon Kit

Note the new buzzer and it’s position NOT blocking the battery.   Totally worth it to get an awesome grip on those sweet double-A’s.   No pun intended.   Well we think it’s much nicer to hold.   And in our opinion, nicer to look at as well.   A further improvement is to bend down the battery clip flares on the negative sides so they quit digging into your fingers during massive bloop-bleep sessions.

Here are some snapshots of how the new setup looks from the front and back.

Fig 6 – Front of the Modified Kit             Fig 7 – Back of the Modified Kit

One of the great things about SparkFun is that if you don’t like the PCB layout, you can download it and fix it yourself, smart ass!   Maybe we’ll do that someday but for now we’re content with our slightly more tactile layout.

Since this board is Atmega168 based, you can treat it (in a programming sense) very similar to an Arduino Lilypad.   In the future, we’ll probably take advantage of the ICSP port to do some reprogramming, but for now we leave you with an awesome repurposing of this fun little kit: The Atari Punk Synth for SparkFun Simon.   Check it out.