The main inspiration for project was a kind of empathy to the engineers who paved the path for modern day computer scientists. By limiting ourselves and physically constructing many of pieces, (sans control and data unit), we can come to a new appreciation of the hard effort that allowed us to enjoy this golden era of computing.
What it does
It plays the classical snake game on a 4 by 4 led matrix.
How we built it
For the hardware we used RobotDyn's Uno arduino -ike microcomputer, 5 bread boards, 16 leds, and 4 buttons with breadboard jumpers to wire everything together. The leds are arrayed in a matrix such that you can individual address a given pixel by running a column low and a row high, or vice versa. The buttons are just plugged in series with a resistor straight into the arduino and they we read the high lows. For the software we used Arduino's IDE for a majority of the coding with support of some C++ libraries we created to help run some of the trickier functionality of Snake.
Challenges we ran into
It's very hard to differentiate between hardware and software problems when you are the one creating the hardware and the software. It can be very confusing when things don't work the way you expect them because you made some small error somewhere in your circuit right after you made a change to the software. You technically can't display two leds at the same time using an led matrix they all light up in series just really quickly. This can create problems like slowdown as you get more lights and flickering if you don't take the proper steps to ensure that you don't overwhelm the micro computer.
Wires hurt.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to fully implement a working snake with no prior experience with arduinos for both of us and very little prior coding experience for one of us.
We managed to hide an easter egg into the game.
We didn't need to get someone more experienced than us to come save us and were able to power through problems we encountered by ourselves.
What we learned
The basic operations of an arduino, how to blow up LEDs, dusted off cpp skills to create a useful class that integrates well with the our snake game.
Don't step on snek
What's next for Snek
A 72x72 led matrix.
Built With
- arduino
- cpp
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