Lucca Says

My final project for this course consisted of a game called Lucca Says, a spin off of Simon Says. The game consists of three separate levels – novice, intermediate, and expert. The intention for this game is to create an interactive object for ages 8 and up that could be played at a desk where there is a wall power connection. To start the game the red button/pillar will light up and flash. If you press on the button as the light is on it will begin the game after a short pause with all the lights off. The game will play a sequence of colors associated with its own individual noises and each time the user gets the sequence correct it will add a new sound and color to the sequence to which you respond. This iterative process continues until the user misses a point in the sequence or doesn’t press the button fast enough. When the user doesn’t press the right button, the game plays middle C and the game ends and plays it’s ending sequence which consists of cycling through each of the colors (without noise) four times.

In order to construct this product it took a lot of time and materials. I got an Arduino RedBoard and used nearly all of the digital pins for the buttons, the NeoPixels, and to connect to the amplifier for the speaker. I used one of the analog pins for a potentiometer that keeps track of which level you have selected for the game. The three levels are accounted for by the potentiometer by doing an initial reading when the game starts up. This means that if you want to change the level of the game you have to turn it off then back on with the switch in the back. The amplifier also has its own potentiometer attached to it that controls the volume of the speaker to make it significantly louder than it is without the amplifier. I have the two potentiometers sticking out the top of the box one labeled with Novice, Intermediate, and Expert to allow for the user to select their playing level and the other with quiet and loud to select the volume.

There was a lot of laser cutting, etching, and prototyping involved with developing this project. I initially started with just a breadboard to get the code working before I put all of the buttons on their own individual protoboards. The initial breadboard is shown below:

(I do acknowledge that this video was taken in portrait and not landscape. I tried to edit it to be in landscape but it wasn’t possible so please excuse this videos orientation.)

I then soldered all of the buttons to their own individual protoboard and added the speaker connected to the amplifier.

I began to start using the laser cutter to get a general idea for the layout. I decided to go with a drumset type layout with circular pillars for the buttons. I asked a good amount of people which style they would like – the pillars in a line or in a drumset type fashion. I even got feedback from a little boy I babysit who inspired the name of this project to be in his honor. He screamed out, “I like drums!”. As soon as he said that I decided it would be fun to pursue that layout of two shorter pillars in the front and two taller pillars diagonally behind the shorter pillars. The general box layout is shown below:

I also experimented with what kind of shape I wanted to have for the pillars and showed some people in the class the rectangular prism shape and then also the possible material for round pillars. It was a unanimous vote for the round pillars. Below is the laser cut examples of the rectangular prism pillars:

Once all of the protoboards were soldered too it was time to start working on the actual assembly inside of the blue 1/8 inch acrylic plastic enclosure. The process of assembling the buttons inside was done by making marker marks for where the center of each of the holes for the pillars were and hot gluing the protoboards to the base.

In order to make the pillars I used acrylic tubing and created a top and base out of the same type of acrylic for the tube. In the base of the tube there was a small slit to allow the NeoPixels to go inside of the tubes. The NeoPixels were hot glued to the inside of the tube with the LEDs facing outward as I had realized that that allowed for more of the light to shine all the way to the top of the tube. I then realized that the light passed through to other tubes so I added some black plastic tape to prevent the light to contaminate any of the other tubes and confuse the user.

It then came down to closing up the enclosure and making the finishing touches. This included adding a switch to the device between the power on the Arduino and the power port on the protoboard holding all of the power for each of the elements. The final design is shown below:

There was a lot of methods used in the code to allow for this game to work. Each of the separate levels have their own individual functions for the game as they have different delay times to allow for the difficulty of each of the levels to be established by the amount of time it takes to press the button and play the sequence. Also, when the NeoPixels light up, I wanted to have it be a gradual light up (of course not too gradual) so every time they light up I cycle through each of the individual pixels to light them up with their respective colors.

My code is available here