Week 9.5

After delivering our presentation we were offered to borrow an Adafruit LED strip from the department and apply it instead of our faulty lights, while also making sure to solder our circuitry onto a perf-board to try and raise our grade.

I agreed to try again and took the strip. I originally tried to control it with simple Pulse Width Modulation and Squarewaves, but it has only proven to be able to make them flicker which was a nice strobe effect but not the desired outcome.

After reading Adafruit documentation and trying out several libraries I hooked up the strip to the correct pin and circuit and ran several examples, I was pleased to see that it had finally worked.

Through the libraries examples, byte messages of ones and zeroes were sent out and divided in fours, defining which light comes on and in what colour, they were differentiated by start packets and end packets which set up the lights properly so that the Arduino knew how to divide the bits.

Following the success with the lights I rewrote my processing prototype to work with the strip which has allowed me to control the movement of the player with the potentiometer and indicate an action by pressing a button.

Once happy with the circuit I transferred it onto a perf-board, making sure to solder on the connections and enclosed within the 3D printed housing.

After delivering the “re-presentation” I drafted some objectives for future iterations:

• The planned completion of the original plan, mainly the development of games, possibly several of them.

•  More robust housing that will accommodate all our circuitry, allow for more intense play sessions and allow access to batteries.

•  Reworked circuitry that makes better use of resistors, capacitors and affords longer battery and component life span.

•  More sophisticated controls, two player mode.

• An exploration of sound and the beat game genre within this format through speakers, microphones and beat detection. I find it would suit the aesthetics of the display.