Bluetooth Maze - Intro

My project for the Bluetooth challenge is a fun game, I have called it a “Bluetooth Maze” , but it is basically an over engineered Labyrinth , to be controlled by a servo/stepper motors mechanism and use one of the Bluetooth Hero boards to drive the mechanism.  Basically the idea here is to bring the Labyrinth board game to the 21st century. Now if you’re a millennial and wondering what is a Labyrinth is – it is a game of physical skill consisting of a box with a maze on top with holes, and a steel marble. The object of the game is to try to tilt the playing field to guide the marble to the end of the maze, without letting it fall into any of the holes.

When I was young this is something I remember playing with my dad, and I have a feeling this improved my hand eye co-ordination and turned me into on of the top players at ping pong(table tennis) in school.  For more info about the game check out wiki page at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(marble_game)) , but if you are after a history lesson, the Labyrinth as a concept dates 430 BC, when it seems to have etched in a coin, for more info- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth

My Hero board of choice is BeagleBone Black Wireless, but my idea also includes another Hero board aka the supporting actor – the BBC micro bit. The BeagleBone black Wireless will be the heart of the project and will be used to drive the servos/stepper motors mechanism to move the Labyrinth base, so that the marble moves around from start to finish. The BBC micro bit/s will be the Bluetooth controller which the player will use to move the board by sending the accelerometer value to the BeagleBone via Bluetooth. I am going to have to make this a multiplayer as Daniel and the awesome folks at element14 are sending me an extra Micro bit.

Also wanted to mention, when writing my proposal I was going through the element14 community site doing random searches, and part of that exercise my proposal drew inspiration from Mini Pinball machine, which has been a part of a series on the The Ben Heck Show.  And The MuZIEum Project(Art-a-tronic) by Enrico Miglino (balearicdynamics, which has a complex stepper motor mechanism which was part of the Pi IoT challenge about a year ago, which I was following closely..

Here are the list of features I plan to implement -

• Build a mechanism to control the ball movement in the maze, the idea here is to use a mix of servo/stepper motors and 3D printing to build a mechanism to move the maze board. I plan to laser cut mdf to build the base of the board.
• Connect a Joystick to the Beaglebone to manually control the mechanism, this will be used to test the mechanism, before I get to the Bluetooth bits described below.
• Use the BBC micro bit to send accelerometer values aka gesture detection to the BeagleBone Black Wireless via Bluetooth which will translated to movement on the mechanism.
• I plan to use 2 BBC micro bit to make this a multiplayer game, this means I will have to come up with new rules for the game.
• Play music from the Beaglebone Bone, and also have it controlled via the BBC micro bit via Bluetooth.

And, if time permits,

• OLED display to show the song playing/volume control and some kind of scoring mechanism.
• I would also like to build an Android app which would send phone accelerometer values to BeagleBone black Wireless to control the maze mechanism.

Most of the parts for the Maze will be laser cut using MDF, to mimic an actual labyrinth game board as shown in the picture above. I don’t think I will have a lot of holes for the first version, as I would like to keep the difficulty level low , and if time permits the plan is to design multiple base plates.And the mechanism for the Servo’s/Stepper motors will be 3D printed to connect the base to the game board.

For the software bit I plan to use python using the Cloud9 IDE that comes with the Debain image installed on the Beaglebone .And the Arduino IDE to program the BBC micro bit, I would have ideally loved to use micro python, but the Bluetooth interface is not supported with micro python because of memory limitations- http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ble.html

While the BBC micro:bit has hardware capable of allowing the device to work as a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device, it only has 16k of RAM. The BLE stack alone takes up 12k RAM which means there’s not enough room to run MicroPython.

And before I forget, I would also like to thank the awesome folks at element14 for selecting my project idea for the Bluetooth Unleashed Design Challenge..