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Logic Gate Board Game 01: Project Planning -- Episode 282

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element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

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Logic Gate Board Game
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The Ben Heck Team begin mapping out the Logic Gate Game by considering its purpose, areas for improvement, reducing costs to build to scale, and materials to be used.  Ben uses a PIC microcontroller with plenty of I/O, wires up a breadboard, and uses ChipKit to quickly roll out code.  The team needs your help deciding on an LCD screen and a microcontroller with enough IO to connect with all the plugs!

 

Ben and Karen begin by mapping out a plan for their prototype using a diagram from a previous build.  They get rid of FLIP-FLOP, COUNTER, NAND, and NOR and keep AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. They can make NAND and NOR using the NOT gates. Each game set will come with 10-20 jumper wires to keep costs reasonable.  Ben and Karen offer different perspectives on how best to set up a learning game and who their target audience will be.

Next, it’s time to Ben and Felix to make a test circuit. Ben takes out a PIC32 starter kit with plenty of IO on it.  You program these with Microchip’s MPLB X IDE which can be found online. If they’re able to find a microcontroller with enough I/O they could conceivably simulate all the logic gates.  The other option would be to use an external I/O expander.  The idea is to use a line of female headers and another line of male headers to crudely simulate their logic gate connections and then trying to do a state machine loop MPlab to get it to simulate what they want.

Before going for it with MPlab, Ben first uses the Arduino ChipKit IDE to make things easier so he can roll out a quick example.  The ChipKit uses a PIC32MX795F512L which has plenty of I/O to test.  Ben wires up the breadboard and writes some code.  They’re writing the logic gates in code instead of using IC’s.

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  • Hey Guys,

     

    I had a crazy idea about the gate layout: Instead of using a number of fixed gates printed on the board, you could try a modular approach with multiple small lcd displays (like the old cheap nokia screens). The board could be divided in four or five identical sections each with a screen, inputs, output and buttons to select the behaviour of the gate. This would also allow for some crazy gamification because multiple gates could be combined into one.

    I've seen this approach being used on guitar effects boards (zoom G3) and it works pretty well from a user experience perspective...

     

    Thanks for the great show and i'm looking forward to what you'll be coming up with!

  • in reply to chdabre

    That's an interesting idea. I believe having multiple screens would be cost prohibitive, and since this is a product that we want manufactured, we would need to be able to source them rather than scrapping them from old electronics. Is there a way you can find a way to achieve your concept with those parameters in mind?

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