Buzz Wire Race Game

Engle

Member
Game_and_Trophy.jpgKiCAD_Schematic.jpgCircuit_Board.jpgElectronic_parts.jpg

A Buzz Wire game started as a fund-raising idea for our village fete. I offered to make something based on a racetrack with timed laps, and the committee jumped at that. To make it more fun I added music, sound effects and speech with a DF Player Mini, as per a previous post. The game was engaging and fun with the audio never stopping and some of the speech speeded up for results etc.

There were advert tracks to encourage game play and to give different crash sound effects during the game. At the race start an arcade beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep was timed to work in parallel to a led sequence. There were timers for feedback during the race. At the end of a race there was more feedback and possible fanfares along with a spoken lap time in tenths of a second. Player times were ranked against a leaderboard and the top 4 positions were spoken if required. There were independent volume controls for audio from the DF Player and for the buzz tone that was created by PWM. The volume was fairly unbearable at maximum.

Soon I ran out of program space on a 20M2, mainly because I liked to see and show the debug output. I swapped out to a 20X2 and kept having to trim back the debug as the program grew. Eventually it was 459 bytes of the 4077 used.

Unfortunately, under twelves performed far worse than expected and a couple were dejected by their lap time, which was sad to see. The adults were so competitive though! The game is a little addictive and frequently people thought they could get the fastest lap by crashing 1 less time. I think the least number of crashes all day was 2, but you must be fairly quick too.

Probably the worst decision was boldly stating I would base the layout on our local racetrack, Snetterton. I already felt committed, then I checked the look of the layout and probably expressed a few expletives based around “oh dear”! 😊 I’ve promised a different track for next year.

I’ve always hand drawn circuits and stripboard layouts in the past, knocked up programs quickly and then wondered what it all meant if I return to it later. This year I wanted to go better and probably took on a bit too many firsts for me:
  • KiCad for electronics schematic and exports of a netlist and bill of materials.
  • VeroRoute for stripboard layout after importing the netlist.
  • InkScape for vector graphics of the laminated sheet.
  • Wavepad for audio editing.
  • DecalProFx for silk screening panels, which has always been a bug bare. Sadly, they’re now out of business. The decal didn’t peel away properly on the bare metal panel but worked perfectly for the plastic mounted volume controls.
  • Brazing to connect the handle and wire, although a nut and bolt seemed almost as good.
  • Getting to know GitHub, Markdown Language (with StackEdit), and Licensing for uploads.
  • Choosing and learning how to use a table saw after cutting my last wonky bit of wood!
  • Trying to make a full documentation set.

It was fun to do and some audio tracks were amusing too. I’ve placed a few in the ZIP file, including the one about a PICAXE being upgraded and taking over the world!

Excluding any copyright music, I’ve made a full upload of remaining files to GitHub including maker details and a presentation folder here .
 

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