A box full of lights and buttons...
The little lad wanted a box with lights and buttons, so I got some from fleabay for arcade machines. They were cheap and I was surprised how good the quality of them is. Each button has a microswitch on the back and an integrated LED with current limit resistor. Looks like the LED's are set up for 12V operation, they work fine at 9V.
I was going to charlieplex the lot but the processor I was going to use had tonnes of IO so I just wired each switch to a pin and wired each LED to a transistor to a pin.
I used darlington drivers to switch the LED's 'cos I had them and it makes building the board a bit easier.
That's it really, simples!
