{"id":18,"date":"2012-04-14T21:54:48","date_gmt":"2012-04-15T02:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monopoly.foxtailsoftware.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2013-07-14T16:26:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-14T21:26:52","slug":"the-best-laid-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"The Best-Laid Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So having &#8220;helped&#8221; 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&#8217;d like to overcome, and there are many features that simply weren&#8217;t within what we could reasonably accomplish given the technology that now seem possible.<\/p>\n<p>So, technology aside, what were the big design flaws last time around?\u00a0 Here are the ones that seemed most obvious to me.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Light leakage between spaces<\/li>\n<li>Dark areas at the top and bottom of each space (where the wood support for the track blocked light)<\/li>\n<li>Uneven space sizes\/shapes<\/li>\n<li>Poor felt quality\/poor logo quality<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There&#8217;s plenty of other problems as well, both in original concept and execution, but I&#8217;ll let those pass.\u00a0 It was something fun for my Dad and me to do together.\u00a0 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&#8217;t bear to put the idea on a shelf for as long as it would take for him to understand and enjoy what&#8217;s going on.\u00a0 (Once he&#8217;s older, I&#8217;ll show this to him and ask him what other ideas he&#8217;d like to see come to life!)<\/p>\n<p>With those problems in mind, what new features are possible given the current state of technology?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Multicolor LED space lighting<\/li>\n<li>Independent property\/color bar lighting<\/li>\n<li>Not having a huge bank of 40 switches to control everything<\/li>\n<li>Not using electrical tape to secure wire connections<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An ambitious project to be sure, and the most complicated build I&#8217;ve done to date.\u00a0 (I suppose the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.furdaze.com\/iidxcontroller.html\" target=\"_blank\">IIDX controller<\/a> was pretty complex, but this will probably be more difficult even than that.)\u00a0 So what materials and techniques shall we use to accomplish these goals?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Solid black acrylic space dividers to reduce\/eliminate light leakage and provide visible lines<\/li>\n<li>Translucent white acrylic panels for each game space to diffuse light evenly<\/li>\n<li>Thin or transparent supports for the spaces to eliminate dark edges<\/li>\n<li>RGB LEDs for each space to provide a wide variety of possible colors<\/li>\n<li>Independent white LEDs on each colored property bar and the In Jail space<\/li>\n<li>Microcontroller brain to run everything using a more limited control set<\/li>\n<li>LED driver ICs so we don&#8217;t need to have 160 or so individual digital outputs from the microcontroller<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Several problems are not yet figured out, but I&#8217;m assuming I&#8217;ll be able to tackle those once I figure out what they are.\u00a0 Should be fun (and frustrating)!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So having &#8220;helped&#8221; 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&#8217;d like to overcome, and there are many features that simply weren&#8217;t within what we could reasonably accomplish given the technology that now seem possible. So, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-construction","category-electronics","category-microcontroller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/monopoly.furdaze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}