octocatch

• 

  the cabient

(note there is a section for qualification to hackiest hack at the bottom)

Inspiration

We were inspired by the many creatures living under the sea especially the octopus as that is our favourite. We also took some inspiration from bullet hell games.

What it does

It is a game cabinet, closely resembling pinball, where the player controls a small octopus character on a ramp and attempts to catch balls that roll down it from a dropper on a belt at the top of the machine. The player’s score is denoted by the time passed from the game start and stops when three balls have been missed by the player.

How we built it

We used tinkercad, an web application by autodesk that allows you to design and simulate circuits with the options to add microcontrollers and edit code. Harry used autodesk inventor to design and model the cabinet, while it also allowed to animate what it would look like.

Challenges we ran into

The simulator eventually got slower as more components were added making it’s speed a tenth of real-time. All of the components were new for Bradley, and following guides sometimes didn’t yield the expected result. For instance, the distance returned but the ultrasonic distance sensor

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got the whole project working on the first day, with extra time to fix some bugs we had found. The renders done by Harry took a considerable amount of time, and one of them was fuzzy but were very usable. On short notice, we were able to edit and deliver a comprehensive video with commentary on our project.

What we learned

Basic circuitry and how to use arduinos after programming them, the libraries they use. What PWM pins are compared to analog ones and running things off of them. Neopixel strips are another thing that aren’t very complex but are versatile to program. Harry also learned how to use autodesk inventory for animating this, however he has not worked on something as complex before. Some minor video editing was also learned for compositing our resources for the project together into a presentable format

What's next for octocatch

It would be cool if we were able to build this without the need for a simulator. Playing with it would be a much better experience too.

Hackiest hack

Using one arduino would’ve been easier to manage (but less powerful) and would allow us to prototype the circuits more quickly with the simulator running slightly slower than real-time compared to what we experienced. The amount of code would be much larger, however, although our current method is using digital pins to convey game state to arduinos (the more proper method is to use the serial library) that are abstracted and control their own set of components. This results in the project running at only 0.1x speed in the emulator so that we had to speed all the videos up for the demo.

Built With

• arduino
• c
• cad
• inventor