Catch ’Em All With These Pokémon Projects

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve already downloaded Pokémon GO by now. With the location-based augmented reality game’s popularity, many Makers have been inspired to create fun and innovative ways to help catch ’em all— whether that’s throwing a real-life Pokéball or juicing up their phone with a 3D-printed Pokédex.

Here are some of our favorites so far!

The Arduino Pokéball works by using the accelerometer in the Arduino 101 to sense that it’s been thrown, then using the Bluetooth on the board, the 101 sends the info to the Arduino Pokéball app on the phone.

This Pokéball knows where it is and connects to the Internet over cellular data. When a Pokémon is nearby, the ball starts to shake!

In this project, we’ll show you how to find Pokémon with the Raspberry Pi. It looks like a lure module, but instead of attracting Pokémon, it lets you know when they’re close.

Not only does it make your boring smartphone look like a sweet Kanto Pokédex, but it also augments your battery with an extra 2600mAh! The case itself is 3D-printed from ABS in classic Pokédex red and acetone polished to a high sheen.

Soon after Pokémon GO released, the safety issues of playing this game outdoor have drawn a lot of attentions. Players run on the street without watching traffic,even one of them fell down from bridge. It is difficult to be aware of surroundings through a camera lens while playing the game. To avoid potential hazards, I decided to make a Pokémon safety badge to trigger motor when the distance between wearer and any object is less than one meter.

3D-printed some parts and used a Circuit Playground from Adafruit that lights my Team Mystic Pokémon hat so you can see me while playing in the dark! Pokémon GO safety!

In this project we’ll show you how to turn a USB battery pack into Pokémon Potion. In the Pokémon GO game, Potion is a medicine used for treating wounds. It’s shaped like a spray bottle and restores your HP. If you play for a while, you know your phone’s battery won’t last all day, but this little DIY prop can actually revive your phone!

Turn your PocketC.H.I.P. into a Pokémon tracking device and go catch ’em all.

This concept video shows what a future version of Pokémon GO might look like running on the Microsoft HoloLens.

The Particle Pokéball is a totally rad Wi-Fi enabled Internet of Things spherical robotics platform! Whew. This is an advanced project that requires some custom made parts, metal-smithing, painting and coding. If you don’t have a Pebble watch, you’ll want to wire up something else that has proportional control like an analog XY potentiometer. This project uses a Particle Photon as the brain and a Pololu motor controller as the brawn.

A customizable e-sneaker with a built-in display that syncs up with your phone and vibrates whenever a Pokemon is nearby.

I thought it would be a cool idea to make it more convenient for someone to find out the type of a Pokémon with a simple voice command. It works by querying the PokéAPI, which requires no authentication, and returning that data to the user. After getting the type of the Pokémon from the API, it creates a sentence to display that data based on how many types the Pokémon has.

I got really excited when I heard about Pokemon Go. But excitement quickly turned into disappointment as I found out the Android runtime on my Blackberry does not support the required API version. So, I took my Gameboy to play some good old Pokemon Red, when a thought struck me. How hard would it be to add a GPS to TCPoke and modify pokered to allow TCPoke to initiate wild Pokemon battles?

Pika, Pika! Don’t forget to share your projects with us.