The Beat Box!

Piano Tiles in real life! A High Stakes Rhythm Game

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the video game Piano tiles, but we wanted to put our own spin on it with LEDs and 3D printing to make a real-life version. Plus, there's a taser to make sure you hit all your marks!

What it does

Using a large 4-track LED matrix, we drop beats on our "screen" just like the game piano tiles! Players must press our jumbo keys to hit beats on time, otherwise they'll get tased after missing 5 notes!

How we built it

We used every tool at our disposal: CAD, Code, and Electronics! We used OnShape to design the entire piano-styled exterior and chassis, C to code our ESP32 microcontroller to manage our audio and gameplay, and standard electronics components + an Amazon taser module for our electronics.

Challenges we ran into

  • We had some group challenges deciding between whether our LEDs would be mounted on a spinning drum for movement, vs using LEDs dropping down a plane. We eventually landed on the standard piano tiles style configuration and we're happy with it!

  • Gabe had to deal with using the two cores of our microcontroller properly to update the LEDs and 360 LEDs in real time. In addition, we ran into issues with peripheral sharing between the Audio and LED libraries, so we had to come up with an alternate implementation.

  • Minh made a rotating ferris-wheel-style chassis for the game, and integrated a rotary encoder, slip ring, and motors in it. However, we did not end up having enough time to integrate it into our final solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This project was a massive undertaking that pushed us to our engineering limit! We worked from 8pm Saturday to 5pm Sunday without sleep, powering ourselves only with Red Bull and Travis Scott playlist.

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