One bored evening in high school I decided to play a free version of DDR, but I wasn’t satisfied with simply pressing the arrow keys on a keyboard and decided to see if I could quickly make a dance pad.

I started by taking an old keyboard apart and tracing the path from different keys to the internal PCB. After a bit of soldering I could trigger keys by shorting different wires together. I then made some simple contact switches by cutting comb patterns out of aluminum foil and gluing them to some paper. A tin can was cut open and duct taped to the bottom of some shoes to act as the bridge between the aluminum foil contact. Now by simply stomping on the paper I could trigger key presses and thus play the game. It actually worked surprising well until the paper and aluminum foil started to crumple.

Sorry for the small size of the pictures, they are all I have left from this project.