F19: Space Impact

Abstract

Space Impact is a classic game from the days of the Nokia era. Our objective is to design a game in which a player is prompted to protect a spaceship from incoming missiles by moving the ship up and down. The player will also have the ability to fire back at the incoming enemies. The enemy ship's movements will speed up as the game progresses, increasing the difficulty of the game.

Example Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh49RWFnZHk

Objectives & Introduction

Introduction:

We intended to design an embedded system whose sole purpose is to run an arcade game with just an RGB LED Matrix and a microcontroller. The game itself involves a user controlling a spaceship through an accelerometer, guiding the spaceship across many enemy spacecraft and obstacles. These obstacles are generated randomly and appear from the right-hand side of the screen. The player shoots the obstacles with bullets by pressing a button clearing a path for him or herself. The game starts on the press of the button and ends when the players runs out of health by taking too many hits. The objective of the game is to survive as long as possible acquiring as many points as he or she can.

Objectives:

Interfacing the RGB LED Matrix with SJTwo Microcontroller
Coding simple to use display functions for displaying spacecraft, bullets, enemies at any given position
Randomizer to generate random locations for enemies
Tasks that can move the spacecraft and detect collisions between:
- Bullet to Bullet (Cancels out)
- Bullet to Enemy (Clears enemy and increments score)
- Enemy bullet to ship (Damage to ship and decrements energy bar)
- Ship to Ship (Extra damage to energy bar)
Interrupt to be generated on press of button to start game/fire bullets
Score Counter and Energy Counter to be displayed at the top and updated in real time as the game progresses
Title Screen and Game Over screens
MP3 driver for playing audio

Team Members & Responsibilities:

Nikhil Pabbisetty: Wiki Page, LED Matrix Interfacing, Game Design
Hari Haran Kura: Game Design, Github Repository
Daniel Tsai: Game Design, PCB Design

Schedule

Week#	Date	Task	Current Progress	Actual Completion Date
1	10/01/2019	Project Proposal Submission.	Completed	10/01/2019
2	10/15/2019	Create our own Wiki page of Space Impact. Discuss the various challenges that might come up with during the design phase and report it as top questions. Discuss what kind of components would be needed for our design.	Completed Completed Completed	10/15/2019 10/15/2019 10/15/2019
3	10/22/2019	Finalize the Bill of Materials. Place order for Hardware components. Downloading All the Software and Document(Datasheet) required for designing and field testing.	Completed Completed Completed	10/22/2019 10/22/2019 10/22/2019
4	10/29/2019	Delegation of tasks to each team member. Reading the 64x64 LED-Matrix datasheet.	Completed Completed	10/29/2019 10/29/2019
5	11/05/2019	Test LED Matrix by writing GPIO driver. Initial PCB Circuit and Design using Eagle.	Completed In Progress	11/08/2019 N/A
6	11/12/2019	Implement Drivers for input controls. Display the spaceship and control its movement using input buttons. Generate projectiles from the spaceship on user input.	Complete Complete In Progress	11/11/2019 11/12/2019 N/A
7	11/19/2019	Use Accelerometer as input controls for spaceship instead of buttons. Randomizer to generate enemies at random locations at end of the screen. Move the enemies towards space ship and generate enemy bullets.	In Progress	N/A
8	11/26/2019	Implement collision detection between 1) Spaceship and enemy (Game Over) 2) Spaceship's bullets and enemies (Kill enemies) 3) Spaceship and enemies' bullets (Reduce health of spaceship) 4) Spaceship's bullets and enemies' bullets (The bullets should cancel out each other)	In Progress	N/A
9	12/03/2019	Add Score counter and health meter.	In Progress	N/A
10	12/10/2019	Final testing and Fine-tuning.	In Progress	N/A

Parts List & Cost

S.No.	Parts	Seller	Quantity	Price
1	SJTwo Microcontroller	Preetpal Kang	1	$50
2	RGB LED Matrix Panel - 64x64	Sparkfun	1	$85
3	PCB	JLC PCB	1	$10

Design & Implementation

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Hardware Design

Our design for LED control was based on the below simplified diagram. First we need a LED Matrix controller(or GPIO Extender, for reason that we only need to signal 0/1 to turn on or turn off each unit of our Matrix), IC1, as shown in the middle of the pics, then wire the input side interface to our SJ-2 Board, using the protocol we have learned in CMPE244 course (I2C or SPI) to interfacing with the controller, telling controller which unit should be update, then after receiving command from Host side(SJ-2 Board), the controller would decide which unit of LED Matrix should be turn on or which unit should be turn off. And then we can form our LED animation base on above transmission pattern.

Note: The diagram is for 8x8 Matrix case, so for our case, we need to find a controller with at least 128 GPIOs output pin.

CmpE244_F19_T4_BlockDiagram.PNG

Hardware Interface

For our design, we would prefer the most common used buses nowadays in industry and base on what we have learned in our CMPE244 courses, it would be either I2C or SPI. It also need to be compatible with our controller, so the key factor to decide how our design would be is which one out of these two was equipped in the controller we choose.

Software Design

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Implementation

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Testing & Technical Challenges

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<Bug/issue name>

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Project Source Code

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References

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