Mole Control

Inspiration

We are children at heart and wanted to create a project that evokes nostalgia for the familiar "whack-a-mole" arcade game.

What it does

We created a "whack-a-mole" type game using several LEDs that randomly light up until the user "whacks" the corresponding LED using our wifi "whacking" interface.

How we built it

Used an Arduino, ESP32, 3 buttons, 3 LEDs, and a phone!

Design Process:

This project is designed to simulate whack-a-mole, where we incorporated LED lights to represent moles and buttons to represent hammers.

We began by getting the circuitry down, and once we had each light correspond to a button, we began working on the code.

We incorporated code from the loop() function found in an f20 devpost from Roberto Milan and Ryan Oliver. The other code we wrote after beginning to use the Blynk app (we had originally planned to use Adafruit but it did not work with this function).  In particular, the code to connect the ESP32 to the Blynk app was tricky and took some time, but after we got it, our project worked well after figuring out some initialization code! 

Technology description

In this project, we used LEDs, pushbuttons, an ESP32, and an Arduino to represent the game Whack-A-Mole! The LEDs represent the moles popping out of the holes, and corresponding pushbuttons represent whacking them with a hammer. There is a timer and start button connected to the game using the Blynk app, as well as a score board. The ESP32 was used to incorporate these IOT components. The code randomizes which LED button lights up and keeps track of the score and timer with the Blynk app.

Challenges we ran into

Problems with WiFi connection; additionally wanted to use Adafruit for connection, but couldn’t figure out how to connect it the same way which they did in our inspiration post - Problems with circuitry and connecting each button to corresponding LEDs
Problems with timer in the gameplay; it does not update as often as it should. This makes gameplay a little bit irksome, but looking at our code we couldn’t figure out why this was. It could potentially be a wiring problem

Iteration

Circuitry without gameplay
Putting in IOT component and connecting it to WiFi.
Circuitry, IOT, and gameplay all working together. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of We're proud of learning about the functionality of game design and about the interface of the Blynk app. ## What we learned We learned how software and hardware are able to communicate through interfaces, such as the Blynk app. Additionally, we learned how to think like a video game designer as we created our game.