Project 1
Interactive LED Matrix Game - Semi Snake
Overview
The game starts as a red snake with a length of 1 and a green target onscreen. Moving to the target increases the snakes length and produces another target on screen. Get all the targets in time to win.
Materials used
| Component | Number used | Discription |
|---|---|---|
| Arduino Nano 33 IoT | 1 | Microcontroller |
| 8 x 8 LED Matrix | 1 | 64 cell with 24 Control pins for Red and Green LEDs at every cell |
| Wires | 49 | Varing Lengths for pin to pin connections |
| Resistors | 10 | Used to limit current to prevent damage to elecrtical components |
| Shift Registors | 2 | Allows 3 pins to drive 8 pins allowing more connections |
| Slide Potentiometer | 2 | Changing the slide changes the resistance allowing for the detection of different inputs |
Update Log
1 Feb - To start building the game, We had to figure out how to work the LED matrix. We started with hooking up all anodes and cathodes for the red LEDs to power and ground to test them.
6 Feb - We built a driver to turn on the power to engage specific LEDs.
8 Feb - Next We hooked up the 10K slide potentiometer as an analog input to turn one the LEDs.
9 Feb - After verifying that this worked we set up a second 10K slide potentiometer as an input. This allows 2 dimentional selection, wich works nicely with our matrix driver as a row/column select.
13 Feb - Added filtering to input to reduce jittering
The type of filtering shown abouve is called Median filtering but it is essentially a 5 point average of the inputs
14 Feb - Next we set up targets, and scoring. Targets will spawn on the matrix one at a time in random positions, moving to the target position scores, removing the target and populating the next one. We added time tracking, which displays on the serial moniter at the end of each game.
15 Feb - Next we add history tracking, as you score goals you will illuminate an additional LED, which will form a trail after the current location showing previous locations. After a set amout of goals the game ends and resets with new random goals.
19 Feb - We added 2 shift registers to control the row select and the red column select.
20 Feb - We added an end screen and parced the time to pass/fail on the display.
Found Ghosting artifacts during night/dark environments, added function to turn off LEDs and raise grounds. fixes the extra illumination
Added functionality for green LEDs. Set up the green LEDs to work the target and passing ending
21 Feb - Recorded and Embeded Video of game play. Also finished log.
Schematic
Challenges
- Vertical positioning of one of the slide potentiometers.
- Displaying the Green and red LEDs on the LED matrix at the same or simular times.
- Intensity of the LEDs with multiple on together.
Future Work
- We would love to change the input from slide potentiometer to sliding capacitive detection.
- Changing the Green column select to anothe shift register.
References
- The code used for the shift registers was used by students from a prevous class.
- The code can be found in the Arduino Examples included with the IDE.