Ethereality
Got the PCBs in, but before playing with those, I finally had a chance to test some of the wireless communication bits. Seemed like the XBees were set up to be as easy to use as possible, and that’s the experience I ended up having. Did a little bit of digging to confirm what chunks of code I needed, but pretty quickly got it up and running.
The Netduino that I’ve been using all this time is still running the LED driver, and now has a countdown cycle that I can trigger with the on-board button which lights a number of LEDs, then turns one off each 1/4 second. I then added an XBee Series 1 to it using an Arduino shield, and put in a bit of code to also trigger the countdown cycle any time the XBee receives data.
That meant it was time to break out the Netduino Plus, hook up an XBee, and have it transmit a single character when its on-board button is pressed. At first I worried it hadn’t worked, because it didn’t seem to respond to my first button press, but later presses worked exactly as desired. Press button on one board, watch LEDs controlled by other board light up then die down. Pretty dang cool.
Side note here is that this is the first time I’ve run the LED board off battery power. Got a lot of flicker on them in this configuration, unfortunately. That being said, it’s working on 4 AA cells, whereas the final is probably going to be running 4 D cells. Hopefully that difference will help even out the power and make things shinier. If not, I’ll have to spend more time figuring out the power solution than I’d hoped.
A Waity Conversation
Well, waiting on the PCBs to come in. Should be in by the time I get back from a trip over the next several days, so hopefully I can try playing with some things. I’ve also ordered up a few more components in an audacious plan I’ve come up with. After looking into the wireless stuff more, I think that’s the way I want to go, so I now have some tiny transmitters and receivers, along with another microcontroller board. I ended up getting a Netduino Plus for this half of the project since it already has an SD card slot built in. I got a cheap SD card shield for use otherwise, but I don’t want to add too many external components to the system, as that uses up valuable I/O pins. I’m optimistic that this will work out pretty well, but I’m also back into an area that I haven’t planned out quite as well as the previous bit. I may need to spend some time sitting down again and planning things out a little more firmly.
Bah, planning. Who needs that anyway?
The Gathering (of Materials)
This will be an ongoing process, acquiring all the stuff needed to make this project a reality. I’m actually back-dating a few of these posts as I’m starting the documentation process, so I may have skipped a few steps here and there. Anyway, here’s some of the stuff that’s already come together to start making this happen.
- Acrylic, and lots of it! Turns out a local plastics supplier, Regal Plastics, has a scrap pile. You can go rummage around and get their leftovers for cheap. I picked up a variety of different plastics including opaque black, translucent white, and transparent clear for about $8.00. Hopefully I have enough for what I need to do, but even if not, it gives me lots of material to test with and decide what will work best.
- Acrylic solvent adhesive. Wanted to get Weld-on from the plastic supply house, but they were out of applicators. I ended up getting some adhesive from a local hobby shop instead. Either way, the stuff actually causes the two acrylic pieces to fuse together into one, giving a nice strong joint.
- RGB LEDs. Got a few packs from eBay. Probably have more of these than I need, but wanted to have spares and extras in case my plan of one LED per space turned out to be infeasible.
- White LEDs. No sense in wasting an RGB LED on a section of the board that has a native color, like the property bars or the In Jail section. Just light those with a simple white LED and move on with life.
- Netduino microcontroller board. I’ve done raw PIC programming before and played with an Arduino a bit, and this time I’m going to try something different. A coworker was doing a project with this, but realized he needed a more powerful board, so I got this from him at a discount. May as well see if it’ll do the job I want!
- Two line LCD display. Rather than have a huge switch bank, we want to reduce the number of controls needed for this. To do that, we’ll need to provide user feedback about what those controls are doing. Two lines of LCD display seem to be quite sufficient for my purposes.
- Lots of miscellaneous electronics parts. I’ve been projecting for a while now, so there’s lots and lots of goodies in my bins already. Many of them should be useful in this process.
I also have picked up a couple of plastic-specific saw blades for my table saw and miter saw. They’ve worked reasonably well so far, but I’m hoping that I’ll learn even more about how to best use them to get nice, solid, clean cuts in this material. The less sanding and edge-polishing I have to do, the better.
The Best-Laid Plans
So having “helped” build a lighted board before, what do I want to get out of a newer board now? Well, there were several problems in the original that I’d like to overcome, and there are many features that simply weren’t within what we could reasonably accomplish given the technology that now seem possible.
So, technology aside, what were the big design flaws last time around? Here are the ones that seemed most obvious to me.
- Light leakage between spaces
- Dark areas at the top and bottom of each space (where the wood support for the track blocked light)
- Uneven space sizes/shapes
- Poor felt quality/poor logo quality
There’s plenty of other problems as well, both in original concept and execution, but I’ll let those pass. It was something fun for my Dad and me to do together. I actually have a newborn boy (which is why this build is going to take much longer than it otherwise might need to) but I just can’t bear to put the idea on a shelf for as long as it would take for him to understand and enjoy what’s going on. (Once he’s older, I’ll show this to him and ask him what other ideas he’d like to see come to life!)
With those problems in mind, what new features are possible given the current state of technology?
- Multicolor LED space lighting
- Independent property/color bar lighting
- Not having a huge bank of 40 switches to control everything
- Not using electrical tape to secure wire connections
An ambitious project to be sure, and the most complicated build I’ve done to date. (I suppose the IIDX controller was pretty complex, but this will probably be more difficult even than that.) So what materials and techniques shall we use to accomplish these goals?
- Solid black acrylic space dividers to reduce/eliminate light leakage and provide visible lines
- Translucent white acrylic panels for each game space to diffuse light evenly
- Thin or transparent supports for the spaces to eliminate dark edges
- RGB LEDs for each space to provide a wide variety of possible colors
- Independent white LEDs on each colored property bar and the In Jail space
- Microcontroller brain to run everything using a more limited control set
- LED driver ICs so we don’t need to have 160 or so individual digital outputs from the microcontroller
Several problems are not yet figured out, but I’m assuming I’ll be able to tackle those once I figure out what they are. Should be fun (and frustrating)!
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