In the very early days

 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 decisions" from the player - if they wished to turn to face a particular direction, or to shoot towards a target - this controlled provided the user with a number of buttons to select which action this wished to carry out.


Even in these very early days, the signs were encouraging. It was relatively easy to connect up multiple board sections to create a "dungeon crawler" type game, and to track pieces as they moved around the "dungeon".


We quickly prototyped some different board sections shapes, with a view to adding a 3d element to each board section and had PCBs manufactured


Gluing up some laser cut mdf and some cardboard panels and we had some pretty decent looking sci-fi terrain (with built-in electronics) relatively easily


The final board - when a few pieces were connected together - looked pretty impressive!


So what went wrong?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding the hall sensor input matrix

Image
 We're using "multiplexing" to read our grid of 16 hall effect sensors. This means we don't need to use 16 individual input pins for reading inputs (which would just about max out an Arduino, and would be too many pins for a NodeMCU ESP8266 type microcontroller). Instead, we split our grid into "rows" and "columns". Then we activate each row, and read the values from each column. This means we need four i/o pins for the rows (outputs) and four i/o pins for the columns (inputs). Let's look a little closer.... Each hall sensor needs power (3.3v-5v supply) a ground connection and has a "floating" signal pin. When a magnet is presented to the sensor, the signal pin is forced "low" (to ground). When the magnet is removed, the signal pin is left floating (note, it is not driven "high" but allowed to "float" to whichever default value we want it to take - the technical term is "open drain" but we don...
Read more

Wireless means one wire less

Image
 Suddenly, the idea of having wifi modules that can automagically connect to a home network seems like a great idea for a multi-part board gaming surface. Instead of having a single, master controller that all the hardware eventually connects to, then using that as a bridge to the app running on a phone/tablet, we can just have the app and the board game pieces talk to each other seamlessly over wifi. And the best thing? One less wire. There'd be no need for a data wire or even for all the board pieces to be physically connected to each other. You could have one over here, one over there, one somewhere else.... So long as there was a consistent means of getting power to the devices, each one could effectively be a stand-alone unit. We could even put a rechargeable battery in each board section - just switch them on, throw them down onto the table, and you're ready to play! Of course, having multiple board sections for a nice large playing area (such as a HeroQuest dungeon or a ...
Read more

Fewer pins = better?

Image
 The idea of losing the data wire, and requiring only power and ground to make our board sections work feels almost revolutionary! Suddenly, we could have board sections on top of buildings (for large, open area wargame type scenarios). But reducing our connectors down to just two pins (instead of three) also means a slight problem - because a two-pin connector isn't symmetrical. And, as we've already discussed, having boards with just two pins can mean all kinds of problems if someone were to rotate the board around, and try to connect incompatible pins together And the answer was as simple as it was obvious. Simply stop trying to make the board panels symmetrical! Don't allow people to rotate the boards to connect them together! In fact, making the board panels in such a way that they could be  rotated only means additional complexity in working out where each square on the board is, in physical space. As the board piece rotates, the physical location in space of our 0,0 ...
Read more