Digiware Monopoly

Controller and Arduino hub

Overview

Inspired by the UB Hackathon theme, our team made a functional and partly physical monopoly game called Hackopoly! We wanted to create something that was a mix of software and hardware to fuel all of our team members' passions. We also themed our game around our beloved school, including academic buildings, UBIT, and AI violations in replace of Monopoly's "jail."

Motivation

We wanted to make something fun, themed, and doable! We learned the spirit of the hackathon by staying up **all night**, chatting with others, and developing new skills on the fly! This was the first time most of our team has pulled an all-nighter, but together we were able to get through. Learning how to integrate hardware and create a working game is also a new process, especially to this scale, for all of us.

Process

We created a user controller using Arduino components, with a RF24Lo1 Module for wireless communication. For the virtual component, we used pygame and pyseriel to render the board and communicate with the Arduino including parsing the responses given by the controller.

Some challenges we faced were, getting the wireless communication to work with multiple "remotes" and discovering how valuable sleep is. This was a new process for all of our team members. We learned how to work together and keep motivated. The biggest struggle was integrating hardware and software to work together, including many times the code seems to give out on us.