March - Preview of the Tilt Ball Machine

After making some finishing touches on the Earthquake Simulator, Mr. PZ and I both decided it was time to send the project back for electrical and mechanical maintenance. When discussing what type of project I would like to work on next, I decided that I wanted to be able to program from scratch, as a large issue I ran into with the Earthquake Simulator was a lack of proper code documentation. Mr. PZ said that the Tilt Ball Machine would be a good fit for me, but the project was still in development. My first step to work through was creating plans for a user experience (figure 1). I decided on the option of incorporating two modes: ‘cooperative’ and ‘competitive.’ ‘Cooperative’ is where two players will work together to get as many goals as they can, which will be signified by one of the holes lighting up at a time. There will be the chance to beat an overall record set by past players, meaning I will need to implement an organized leaderboard. ‘Competitive mode’ is where each player will be assigned a different color. Two goals will light up at the same time, with exactly one goal lighting up in each player color. For this mode, there will not be a leaderboard, as it is more focused on the two players competing than the number of goals.

Once my plans were refined, I began writing a program for individual components. The first component I worked with was the 24 NEO Pixel LED Ring (figure 2). I had to reconfigure the Raspberry Pi I worked with during software training so that I could connect the LED Ring. The DPiComputerExample was helpful in learning the basics of communicating with the LED Ring. Once I was confident in the basics, I worked on a function to turn off and on the LEDs in a specific color. My original intention was to just flash the colors on or off, but I decided to make the function more interesting by doing so in a spiral motion (figure 3). Later on, I added the parameters ‘offset’ and ‘num_leds’ so that specific portions of the LED array can be selected if needed. After creating that function, I wanted to make another to light up half the LEDs in one color and the other half in another color; then, the colors will each be shifted right and continue around the circle. This required making the modifications to the spiral function mentioned above. To end my time programming the single LED ring, I added an if statement to change the light show based on the project’s status. This means that there are now pre-programmed settings for different game modes as well as when the project is idle.

DELTAs:
Empathy: I added a docstring to each LED function I created. This means that when someone hovers over the function anywhere in the code, they will get shorthand information about the parameters, how they are used, and what the function does. I did this so that a future programmer working on this project can quickly understand how the code works and how to call the function properly.

Creativity and imagination: Planning out the Tilt Ball Machine’s program required creativity and imagination. I needed to picture scenarios that might be the most fun for players as well as ways to make the game replayable and customizable. Overall, making iterations on my plan will lead to a more solid, enjoyable game for users.