Simon Says - Science Fair

A Simon Says memory game I built for a TDK Lambda science fair, exhibited at the Big Bang Fair, the UK's largest celebration of STEM for young people.

The game has 10 levels. Each level plays a colour sequence one step longer than the last, and the player repeats it back using four arcade buttons (red, green, yellow, blue), each with its own tone. Three lives. Get it wrong and the level replays; lose all three and it's game over. But if you complete all 10 levels, the real payoff: a capacitive discharge circuit fires, dramatically destroying a sacrificial MOSFET in a flash and a bang.

The first prototype was an Arduino Uno on a breadboard wired to tactile switches and LEDs. Once the game logic was solid, I moved to hand-soldering everything onto stripboard: shift registers for the button LEDs, header pins for the LCD, and a ribbon cable connector to keep things tidy.

Inside the enclosure: an Arduino running the game state machine, shift registers driving the button LEDs, a 16x2 character LCD for status messages, and a row of LEDs tracking level progress. An acrylic window lets you see the electronics. The discharge circuit uses TDK Lambda power supplies to charge a capacitor bank, with a relay-triggered dump into the MOSFET.

We took the game to the Big Bang Fair, the UK's largest celebration of STEM for young people. The TDK Lambda booth had the Simon Says game alongside the capacitor discharge unit so visitors could play a round and then watch the MOSFET destruction live.

The exhibit was featured in Electronics Weekly and the North Devon Journal.

Try the browser version below: same rules, same sequence logic, same dramatic ending (minus the real explosion).