Cyclops

Inspiration

What it does

It is a semi-fully functional physical arcade game where you try to stop a constant moving LED sequence on a specific spot. The goal is to accumulate as many points as possible before you miss 3 times and the game ends.

How we built it

We used an arduino as the main processor for the game. We used a neopixel RGBW strip for the LEDs, an LCD screen to display points and number of misses, and 3 buttons to control the game. The arcade cabinet is made from a shadow box and foam board.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge that we had to overcome was getting the neopixel strip to do what we wanted it to. There are multiple libraries that can be used with the strip and some documentation on how people have changed the libraries to do various things, however executing it was a lot more complicated than we had anticipated. We spent the most of our time figuring out how the get the strip to work.

Another challenge we had was with a feature we ultimately could not include in the final project. We wanted to save the top high scores and display them when the game was not in play however we did not have enough time to figure out how to communicate from a text file to the arduino and back.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to have a finished project. Both of us have experience with arduino however the tech we were using and the scope of this project was outside of anything we have done.

What we learned

We've definitely learned a lot of new arudino skills. We've also learned how much of a project you can realistically finish in a day or less. The project we set out to complete is definitely more complicated than anything we've done however it was not completely out of reach. If we planned to complete this project over a couple of day or weeks, we could complete the project fully.