Pet Trick Phase 1 – IPC

October 2nd, 2010 in Home Categories by ezraezra1 Comment

Assignment: “Stupid Pet Trick. Make a simple physically interactive device that uses the skills you’ve learned in the labs. It must respond to a physical action or series of actions a person takes, and it must be amusing, surprising, or otherwise engaging. It doesn’t have to be practical, or complex, as long it shows that you understand the basics of digital and analog I/O and how to use them.”

I had a few ideas for this project, ranging from Dance Finger Revolution, Trumpet Hero, Angry Pet, to the “Shut Up” sign. They are all feasible projects, except they would take too much time or not enough time. I wanted to do something that would be somewhat of a reach, but still feasible to finish within two weeks, and still have time to do other work. After pondering it for a while, I decided on Tic-Tac-Toe.

The project is currently broken down into three phases. Phase 1: Figure out schematics, layout, code, and parts. Phase 2: Build gaming boards and program. Phase 3: Test, eat, and test again.

Due to the amount of I/O offered by the Arduino, row-column scanning was used for the LED board mock-up. The rows are Anode (positive) and the columns are Cathode (negative). The rows where then connected to a shift register, while the column to a digital I/O in the Arduino. Originally I was planning on having all LED’s hooked up to the shift register, but apparently the Arduino and/or shift register is/are not a big fan of that idea. Each “section” of the tic-tac-toe mock-up board is represented by 4 LED’s: 2 in series, which would be connected in parallel with each other to have 4 in total.