Tap Tap Rainbow started as a genius idea from my daughter. Her idea was to sort the colours of a shuffled rainbow, as fast as possible, into a beautiful rainbow.
I instantly loved the idea and we started brainstorming how we could turn this into a game.

The concept we agreed on was a row of LED's on top and a rows of clicky arcade buttons on the side. The top LED's represent 6 colours of the rainbow, Red, orange, yellow, green,blue and purple.
The colours on top get randomly shuffled. Each user needs to click the corresponding button in the order of the rainbow colours.
I had plenty of arcade buttons and more then enough LED's to make it into a 2-player game, this way it would be even more fun!

The first one to complete the sequence gets a nice rainbow animation.

I used a string of WS2811 LED's because these are easily programmable. As the controller I used is an Espruino.

The Espruino board is a development board that runs Javascript. So that makes it a lot easier to program, at least for me (I suck at Arduino :D )

The LED's are powered from the Espruino so I it's great I didn't need another power source.
Programming the LED's was very easy. The LED strip is just a big array of RGB values.
The 12 arcade buttons was a bit harder. Eventually after some head scratching, I used the principle of a Keypad Matrix. I had only 12 buttons so a 3x4 grid was enough. This way I only needed 7 ports of the Espruino.

The box is made with a lasercutter. First I generated a box with makeabox.io and further edited in Inkscape.

The assembly was a bit of a mess. My cables where constantly slipping of so I taped everything together :D

Once the project was finished it was time to play! And it's so much fun! We really loved the game and where super happy with the end result.

And believe me, my daughter is absolutely unbeatable in this game!
See the video below for some gameplay ;)