So what's this all about?

 


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 on by a recent article - https://www.hackster.io/news/failed-kickstarter-project-becomes-open-source-power-uppable-rc-car-412de00bc346 - which describes how one maker failed to raise enough money on Kickstarter to turn their project into a product, I was already considering something along similar lines:


If getting something manufactured is simply too expensive, why not make it open source and have people make it for themselves?

This project has been so long in development and still - after over a decade - I've still not seen anything anywhere near like it; I'm no longer interested in launching a cool new product - I just want to be able to play games - either with other people, over the internet, or against a computerised AI. 

In fact, I don't want to have to support a huge community of gamers - this project has reached the stage where it's a personal thing; I just want to be able to play tabletop games myself! I'll probably end up playing most of my games as solo-adventures, against the computer.

So this is a blog about reverse engineering my own product ideas, to re-make a project using easy-to-source, cheap "hobbyist" components, in a way that anyone can have a go.
And, maybe, if one or two of you out there decide to give it a go... maybe we can hook up and play over the internet one day, after all!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The ESP8266

Image
 Many long-time users of the Arduino platform are probably already familiar with the ESP8266. It started out as a wifi-to-serial module you could hook up to your Arduino and send messages over wifi to your flashing LEDs and motor controllers. Then it appeared as an integrated board, and multiple variations hit the market. A common one is the NodeMCU and it's derivatives. These are great little Arduino-compatible modules that you can set up in the Arduino IDE as programmable controllers (just like an AVR ATMEGA328 or similar microcontroller) but they have loads of other cool features (not least of all, multi-threading!) But most of us stick to using them like a beefed-up Arduino (they have loads  of RAM memory and plenty of programmable storage to run pretty sophisticated firmware on them). It was while playing with one of these for a completely unrelated project, that I suddenly hit on the idea of having a "network" of board game playing surfaces, all broadcasting over wi...
Read more

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

Creating our first light-up 4x4 panel

Image
 Here's our first attempt at a 4x4 light-up panel. The idea here is to connect all the 5v and ground pins on the panel together, using copper tape, and create a daisy-chain effect from one strip of LEDs to the next By cutting away at the circuit board, where the 5v and ground pins are, we could create a continuous connection by adding a simple blob of solder from pin to copper strip. Needless to say, it didn't work! But that's probably a good thing - because when it didn't work, it forced us to abandon the idea of using copper tape for the LEDs (connecting each to the next using wires at the end of each strip) which allows us to use the same surface for running copper tape for our hall sensor input array. Our second design was much more successful. It may be easier to think of this as two panels, overlayed into one space. Firstly, there's the LED strip, chopped into bits, and connected up again, into a "snake-like" layout Then underneath this, we have our ...
Read more