These Reactive Cornhole Boards Celebrate Your Scores with Light and Sound

Cornhole, or “bags” for you Midwesterners, is a classic yard game that is perfect for everything from family barbeques to raging frat parties. Various forms of the game have existed for well over a century, and they all have one thing in common: a distinct lack of blinky LEDs and sound effects. As we all know, every game in existence can be dramatically improved with those. To finally address this woeful oversight in bag-throwing technology, YouTuber Hardware Unknown has customized a set of cornhole boards to light up and make noise when points are scored.

In case you haven’t been to a brewery in the past decade and are unfamiliar with the game, the basic goal of cornhole is to throw bean bags at a board. You score a point for every bag that lands on the board and three points for every bag that goes through the hole. You and your opponent take turns throwing bags and your points cancel each other out. This customization doesn’t keep track of the points, but it does provide visual and auditory indicators when bags hit the board or sail right through the hole. The effects are fairly subdued for the former, with more fanfare for the latter. This gives players the electronic slap on the back that they deserve for scoring points.

Instead of going through the trouble of constructing the boards themselves, Hardware Unknown started with a nifty set of folding cornhole boards that already have LED rings around the holes. But those LEDs just stay on all of the time and don’t react to anything. Two sensors were needed to make the boards react to the bean bags: a vibration sensor and an infrared emitter/receiver pair. The vibration sensor detects the force of a bag landing on the board, while a bag falling through the hole interrupts the IR beam. An Arduino Nano on each board is used to monitor those sensors and control the reactions.

The Arduinos control the built-in LED rings and also strips of white LEDs that were added to the perimeter of each board. The sound effects come from a DFPlayer Mini MP3 player board through a small 3W class D amplifier paired with a little mono speaker. Because these boards are designed for outdoor use where there may not be any power outlets, each board is powered by a pack of eight AA batteries wired in series to reach 12V. All of these components are housed within simple 3D-printed enclosures that provide a bit of protection from the elements. The boards do sometimes give false positives and negatives, which isn’t surprising given the sensors used, but overall they work well and should brighten up cornhole games.