Game Cube

A new way to experience board game classics like Connect 4!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration came from a visit of our friend's house. We noticed that he had an entire wall full of board games, including Connect 4, that were just sitting there, collecting dust. This gave us the idea to make a smaller, more efficient, more interactive, Connect 4 game, which eventually became the Game cube.

What it does

We built a "game cube" of sorts. Currently, it only plays connect 4, but in theory, it could be adapted to play any game requiring a low-resolution display and 5 buttons. It uses the two side buttons to change the row that the piece drops in, and the middle to drop the piece.

How we built it

The box itself contains a Raspberry pi (the brains of the operation), and 8x8 LED matrix which is connected to the Pi by wires, two 3.7V batteries, and a voltage step-down converter, for the batteries. To attach the lid, we used neodymium magnets. We coded everything in python, and sent all the code to the Pi via SSH.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges during this event. First off, some of our buttons didnt work at the beginning, and we couldn’t figure out if it was due to the buttons themselves, their connections or the code. Also, our code had a ton of bugs in it, which we had to iron out with the help of our peers and other random testers from our unofficial event. We also had a very difficult time printing our box, as the print, as the print kept failing over and over again. We had to resort to monitoring it during the entire print, and adjusting the heating as it went. Finally, we encountered significant problems using SSH, as every time the Pi lost WiFi , a new IP address was assigned to it, which we did not know for a long time, and made it impossible to connect to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest thing we're proud of is the portability of our box. It's completely self contained, and it relies on its own battery power, so you'll never need to plug it in. It is also really compact, so you don't need an excessive amount of space to store it, unlike real connect 4. We’re also very proud of how editable and modular our cube is. it has easy access to every single component through the magnetic back panel, and the code we used is super simple to edit, for repairs and to create new games. Finally, we’re very proud of how we brought some of this hackathon community together during the event. We hosted a small unofficial 8-person competition to test our cube, and it was great for providing a relaxing break from the stressful hackathon.

What we learned

During the course of this project, we learned many things, including new wiring techniques, building working circuits with different components, and two entirely new python libraries: Rpi.GPIO and Adafruit_IO.

What's next for Game Cube?

We have big plans for our Game Cube. We're going to add more games, such as Tetris, Battleship and more. We're also going to build the reinforced learning model using our database, and add it to our cube as a single-player mode, as well as adding a Battleship AI and AIs for any other multiplayer game we add. We'd also like to take advantage of the shape of our cube and make it modular with other cubes. You could connect them by wires, or connect them online, to have two or more people playing games together on their own cubes, or even stack two cubes on top of each other for a 16x8 board! Finally, we'd also like to add online multiplayer, so that users all over the world can connect and play together!

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