I love playing board games with my girlfriend and "punishment" for the loser. I am still trying to get her to learn swimming for the game she lost couple of months ago. One of our absolute favorite is connect 4. I had made a version on PCB for us to play.
I had made the version 1 using another competition as excuse. We truly enjoyed the concept, but there was couple of mistakes which i made rendering the device more of a novelty game rather than the intended to go device. The second video is an updated casing. so, this time learning from my mistakes as well as usability issues i decided to make the 2nd version with the following changes/improvement
- Make the device game specific. last time i made it multipurpose (Nebula wall art and pixel frame) for a competition purpose. it still serves well for those purposes
- I want to make the device smaller. V1 PCB was around 210x210mm making it less portable and making cases on my Ender S1 Pro was very difficult, i had to hack it to print more than the standard print area
- I Dont want touch. We both prefer the haptics of a click
- Fix the battery circuit. Last time i made a mistake with battery circuitry and would only work on the USB-C cable attached. Effectively breaking the "on-the-go" function
- I want to have ESP32 to enable over the internet play, but will use STM32F103 as main, to conserve battery.
- I also want to make the PCB cheaper to manufacture. The 210x210mm was expensive, so this time i made it modular that way anyone who wants to recreate this, can chosse any LED or LED Strip of their choice. I am gonna go with Wurth LEDs. I fell in love with them because of the seriously awesome reliability. But as i said before, you can use any other LEDs
- PCB to be made in white Solder masks, helps make the light at projection plate more uniform and hide the hotspot better.
- Improved button placement.
Will be posting my updates soon.
