Building a DDR Platform

I also posted this on bsky.

I got into rhythm games during grad school in Korea, since one of my labmates was super into them and our lab was close to a nice arcade. I mainly played Jubeat, but towards the end of my time in Korea, I started playing DDR. This really picked up when I joined Google, since there was a well-maintained machine and an active community. I ended up playing basically every day while I was there.

When COVID hit, I moved back to my parents' house in Florida and decided to "decorate" my "office" with my two favorite perks from work: an espresso machine and a DDR machine.

I got a Breville Barista Express (50% off, for some reason; between my mother's and my daily coffee, it paid for itself in like 2 months) and an LTEK DDR pad.

As far as hard DDR pads go, there are basically three options:^[1] the LTEK (a good intro pad, reasonably priced), the StepManiaX pad/cab (really nice, pretty expensive, perpetually sold out), and an actual DDR machine (expensive, hard to find, unlikely to get past my mom; I actually found a broken one at a bowling alley in my hometown and made an offer, but they never got back to me). So for me the LTEK was a pretty good choice. I got the metal finish without the bar, and it arrived pretty quickly despite coming from Poland in the depths of COVID.

The lack of a bar ended up being a bit of an issue. For a while, I was using the back of a chair with a towel for grip, but the chair back was the wrong height/width and very curved, so it wasn't ideal. I mainly play stamina songs (longer, faster songs with more fluid rhythm rather than short bursty songs with gimmicks), so having a curved bar ended up being pretty rough on my arms.

Coupled with my semiannual existential crisis of "the stuff I work on and research is so far removed from the user that I feel like I never build anything tangible", I felt this was a good chance to try building a bar and platform for the pad. I sketched out the basic design for a platform using some DDR cab schematics that I found online (for the bar dimensions/placement) and my dad and I got to work.

We built it out of pretty basic materials from Home Depot. Basically a bunch of 2x4s plus three steel pipes and some elbows for the bar. If I remember correctly, the bar ended up being a bit wider than a typical DDR cab, but the height was actually pretty close. The pipes were threaded, so it would have been a pain to cut them down to the correct size and we just left it.

The general shape came together pretty fast, despite me using a handsaw for everything.

We had cut a small hole in the frame to fit the USB connector for the LTEK pad.

A couple of last-minute touches to secure the pad and make it look a little cleaner wrapped up the project.

And here is the final result!