Over the past weekend I attended an Intel sponsored 3 days make-a-thon at Tech Shop in San Francisco, California. The premise of this is to make-a-thon was to make a wearable game by using Intel’s Galileo Development board and a wide array of sensors. Our project was to make a game similar to Pac-man.
The biggest challenge that we were faced with was how to gauge were Pac-man was in relation to a ghost. Since we are going to present this at Game Developers Conference (GDC), we decided that GPS sensors we used may not be reliable enough with so much noise and with the event being underground. In the end we went with setting up Bluetooth on two Galileo boards (Pac-man and Ghost, respectively). Using Bluetooth, we are able to exchange info between the boards. Most importantly, we were able to setup gauge proximity using the Bluetooth Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). We configured it so that Pac-man was constantly scanning for registered addresses of Bluetooth devices; When it successfully found one, it would automatically make a connection and gauge the RSSI info and feed that info to the Arduino code to notify Pac-man and to start counting points. We had an LCD display Pac-man’s current state (safe, being chased, or dead) as well as current point value. The ghost had a proximity sensor comprised of 5 LEDs that would display the strength to the ghost.
This event was a great opportunity for me as a student, I have learned a lot about Intel Galileo and Bluetooth as well as meeting a lot of Intel engineers and new friends.
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