WiFiQuest

 In fact, quite the opposite. The multi-section Space Hulk type board worked really well. There were even a few board sections that had additional "goodies" like controllable LEDs (you could send a signal from the app to turn the LEDs on and off - so the terrain appeared to react to what was going on in the game). We even booked a stand at the UK Games Expo (UKGE) in Birmingham's NEC and showed off what we'd been working on. Over two hundred people left their contact details, wanting to know when we were going into production. MDF terrain manufacturer 4Ground took a number of samples to investigate how the whole thing could be "scaled up" and turned into a commercial product. Everything - on the face of it - looked really promising. But nothing came from it. Why? Well, one message that came out loud and clear from UKGE was that we were on to a great idea - but the sci-fi setting wasn't for everyone. In fact, most people who came and showed an interest in...

 One of the very earliest examples of an electronically enhanced board game was adding hall sensors to a series of Space Hulk type board sections These were hand-etched PCBs with a PIC microcontroller mounted on the underside. As the player moved a magnet (glued to the underside of a tabletop miniature playing piece) above each square, the appropriate messages were generated (pick up, put down, which square etc) and relayed back to a "master controller" device. The master controller server two purposes - firstly, it was a bridge between all the board sections and the app running on a mobile/tablet device. The messages generated by each board section were passed along a common single-wire bus, to a single point and then sent to the app via bluetooth. Without this "master controller" we had no way of getting the messages from the boards (hardware) to the game app (software). The master controller also served a second purpose - as a way of getting "command decisio...

 This little blog is to chart the progress (if any) of a project that's been off-and-on (and off and on again) for many years; an electronically enhanced, internet connected boardgaming platform. It's seen many iterations, each building on the last. The basic premise has always been an array of hall sensors, that can detect the presence (or not) of magnets immediately above them. By starting a game in a known state, it's possible to track the playing pieces as a player picks them up and moves them across the board. Whenever a sensor goes from "magnet detected" to "no magnet detected" we know that a playing piece has been picked up. Similarly, whenever a sensor goes from "nothing detected" to "magnet detected" we know that a playing piece has been put down. We can write some software to keep track of which piece has just been picked up, such that when a "put down" signal is detected, we can confidently say which piece has bee...

  Like all good movies, this blog jumps in, not at the start of the story, but right in the middle of the action. Yes, it might feel a little Reservoir Dogs at the minute, as the history of what's happened is yet to come. But this little blog is to chart the progress from now  for a project that has been many (many) years in the making. What started out as a curiosity, almost ten years ago, developed to the point of almost  becoming a commercial product. Thanks to covid, everything shut down for a while - and when it all started up again, mass manufacturing and assembly of relatively complex multi-plexing arrays of sensors and LEDs just made "productisation" of the project commercially unviable. Undeterred, the idea has been sat in cupboard for the last few years, and recently - thanks to being given a "broken" strip of multi-coloured LEDs to play about with - I couldn't help but ask "maybe, just maybe, could it be possible....." In fact, spurred o...