Skee-bidi

Full view of our Skee-ball Machine!
Front view of machine with functional timer and score displays
Wiring, coding, and testing Arduinos
Ultrasonic sensor mount isometric view
CAD for sensor mounts, door, and holes
Attaching
Ball collection system and installed sensors
Attaching the wires to the slave Arduino and sensors
Top view of the machine
Receiving our Best Game Award
Waiting for our Uber outside the venue

Inspiration

For our first hackathon, our team wanted to create a fun project reminiscent of our childhood Chuck-E-Cheese days, simpler times when we didn't need to worry about job applications. We wanted to create something big, substantial, and interactive so that any passersby could have a try.

What it does

At the press of a button, the machine dispenses 3D printed balls and begins a timer. This timer counts down from 100 while you try rolling the balls over a ramp into various scoring holes, triggering infrared sensors for the 100 point holes and ultrasonic for the lower scoring holes. This game works exactly the same as a typical skee-ball machine you'd see at an arcade, but with a cardboard twist.

How we built it

We started out testing our Arduinos, figuring out how to wire the display and create a countdown. Then, we broke into our strong suits: Eric created the CAD models, Bryan created the full cardboard structure, Aryan coded the I2C connections, and Vince coded the sensors. We relied heavily on teamwork, asking for support and taking shifts in each role when needed. Our project was built on code, back pain, cardboard and Arduinos and we're proud about it.

Challenges we ran into

One of our major challenges was communicating between three Arduinos with an I2C connection, and this was the main bottleneck in our projects execution. We resolved this by working together, carefully analyzing the code and trying out different solutions. Initially, we believed the issue to be our lack of pull-up resistors, but by examining our slave functions we found a software-oriented solution. Another issue was with hardware, as our ball-collection system encountered sticking points and the ball would occasionally be stuck inside the machine. This is because we branched away from conventional skee-ball machine design and created a back catcher rather than a pipe system. Through iterations of testing, fixing, we altered the elevation and internal design of our machine until it was working smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team won the Best Game Award, but that's not all that we're proud of. We managed to work through frustrating errors and construct a full sized arcade game, all while learning more about design and Arduino code than simply reading documentation would teach us.

What we learned

Our endeavors into wiring breadboards taught us the structure of LED displays. Coding I2C trained us in the language of host and client connections, and in the creation of our machine we learned the value of prototyping design choices and iterating through our errors.

What's next for Skee-bidi

Skee-bidi will help Vince, Bryan, Aryan and Eric walk through their next projects with more confidence knowing we are capable of designing our own projects, solving errors, and most of all enjoying the entire process with an open mind! Thanks for reading 😁.

Built With

3d-printing
arduino
c++
cad
i2c
infrared
motor-controller
ultrasonic

Submitted to

BoxBots

Created by

I designed the structure of the cardboard, cut, and glued all of it together. I chose this role because of my childhood hobby of creating cardboard structures, but I had never created anything of such scale and function before. My back was in pain for a week, but I learned a lot about the value of design choices and my own capabilities in creation. In aiding my teammates, I also learned about the intricacies of register-level I2C reads/writes, controller-slave architecture, clock stretching for sensors, use cases of pull-up resistors, and CAD design. All of which broadened my horizons and interest in creating new projects.

Bryan Zhu
I designed and prototyped the integration of all the sensors and devices within the cardboard. Doing this was difficult, as I had to also design the ball returning system to avoid all the wires and sensors, which could otherwise cause potential score miscalculations as sensors could record a ball more than once. The sensors also took a lot of tuning and tweaking to get them perfect. For example, our ultrasonic sensors had to be tuned for distance, to count different scores based on the recorded distances (keeping track of multiple holes using only one sensor). The positioning of the sensors were also crucial in the success of our machine. I also worked on the DC motor controller and figuring out motor encoders and rotation speed. With limited hardware, I had to constantly test different motor controllers (as some of the ones we had were broken). Throughout this process, I learned a lot about sensors, and electronics, and how to actually plan and design the hardware around the sensor's limitations, and capabilities. I also learned how to prototype smaller subsystems and integrate them to work seamlessly with one another. Integrating these within the I2C Master/Slave relationship Arduinos was difficult, but in the end, worth it. I'm proud to have worked on and finished this project, and I'm happy to have learned all these skills with my group.

Vince Liwongan
I was responsible for developing the CAD models through Solidworks for this project, which included designing custom mounts for the IR and ultrasonic sensors, as well as a dedicated DC motor mount and the dispensing door assembly. This was my first experience creating fully defined 3D components in CAD, and it taught me a great deal about part modelling, shelling, tolerancing, and iterating through multiple design revisions when early concepts failed to meet functional requirements. In addition to the mechanical design work, I also handled the wiring and programming of the motor controller for the dispensing door, integrating it seamlessly into Aryan’s existing I2C communication architecture.

Eric Wu
Aryan Patel