Inspiration
As a group of Computer Engineering students, we thought that the most fun we would have at this hackathon is working with hardware. Making a fun interactive game was a great way to show off all our skills over the past few years, and a great send-off to our final semester here at UB
What it does
Our game mimics the water gun shooting game at carnivals. A stand alone nerf gun "shoots" a laser at the target. It is up to the person to aim at the small hole in order to fill the meter up. Once the meter is full, you win!!! However, if you don't fill up the bar before the timer runs out, you lose.
How we built it
We used two Arduinos for this project. One Arduino is set up with a battery on the nerf gun. This allows the user to pull a trigger to activate the laser on the front of the Arduino. A power switch was soldered on the power wire in order to turn the gun on or off. The other Arduino is connected to the game itself. This Arduino controls all the LEDs on the game board by reading the data from a phototransistor hidden inside the hole where to aim. The Arduino is able to the fill up the LED meter by reading how long its sensing the laser pointed at it. There is a ring LED around the target as well that shows the time remaining for the game by slowly counting down after the game starts.
Challenges we ran into
For this section, as we split each element of this project up, each team member has different challenges they faced: Austin - In the future, value hardware debugging as much as software debugging, since both problems are significant in coming to a solution. Avi - Dealing with faulty peripherals, and learning to solder. Dean - Inconsistencies when working with Arduinos. Gabriel - Soldering small components, and trying to print a large scale design.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Just like the challenges, each team member had something they were proud of: Austin - Writing usable code while sleep deprived in 4 hours Avi - Getting the behavior of the ring LED to work and soldering it correcting Dean - Being able to combine the code of 3 very sleep deprived people and having the project work Gabriel - Getting the chance to draw a design for the project, as well as soldering together an LED strip and having it work again (essential for the project)
What we learned
Doing a project like this allowed us to really get comfortable with different formatting of LEDs. From circles to strips. A lot of this project helped confirmed our confidence with using hardware and embedded systems in general. We are really proud of this project and what we have designed as a group.
What's next for us?
Unfortunately, as we are all senior Computer Engineering students, this is our last Hackathon. Our next steps is hopefully working in industry (or grad school) doing fun projects just like this!
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