24 May, 2011 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Hungry Paddle

For the last few weeks we’ve been working on a paired miniproject for our hardware design paper. We were asked to use a development board (kinda like a mini motherboard) to create a basic game where a paddle on the bottom of the screen catches falling balls/eggs. As easy as it might sound, we actually had to write the hardware description code to make everything work. If you don’t know what that means, basically we had to write code that turns pixels on and off at certain times to display animating objects on the screen. The development board we’re using operates at 25MHz and the whole screen refreshes 60 times per second. We worked a lot with binary numbers so we become pretty familiar with representing information in arrays of 1s and 0s. After a lengthy process of coding, we finally completed a functional game which, in my opinion, is pretty addictive!

We gave our game the title “Hungry Paddle” which is shown on the menu screen when it is first loaded. There are two modes of the game – training and the actual game. When the training mode is selected, the user has to catch 10 balls (or “cookies”) at the slowest speed to complete the training level. Next, the user can choose to play the game and has to progress through the levels as the balls get faster and more balls appear on the screen at the same time. In order to move to the next level, the user must collect the required number of balls before the countdown timer reaches 0 seconds. If the user succeeds in all four levels, the game is won. Otherwise if the time runs out, the user loses and can choose to try again from level one.

We have our interview/presentation for our project tomorrow at 2pm so I’m hoping that it will go smoothly. Afterwards we have a six page report due on Thursday and then another project due next week. Pretty hectic times till the end of the semester but I’m sure I’ll get there in the end!

21 October, 2010 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Garage Door… OPEN!

This whole semester we’ve been working on a project where we had to build a transmitter and receiver for a remote control garage door. This last week has been hectic but towards the end of the week was the business end of the course where we had to give a demonstration to show that it works. There’s actually a lot of technical detail behind the project but I won’t go into it too much.

This week I’ve spent two nights at uni in the labs until 9 and 10pm trying to get the system working and we’ve had a few hiccups along the way. But the bottom line is that we managed to get things working to at the end. Here are some photos from the testing stages:

When we had to give a demonstration of our project, we managed to receive our digital signal at the receiver over a metre away. It was a little disappointing that they didn’t actually have the model garage door for us to physically open so we just had to read our signal off the LED lights.

Our full garage door opening circuit

20 April, 2010 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

MM2 Project

So I didn’t sleep last night. My maths project took me all night to do and I didn’t even end up finishing it until there was 10 minutes left before due time at 2pm! In an epic attempt to rush to get my project in on time, I brought my laptop to Uni and found Jesse in the Engineering library, studying for his test tonight. I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track seeing as Jesse had already completed and submitted his project. I’m so glad I managed to get that project in on time though. Now I have an Electric Circuits test tomorrow to study for…