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Hello all and welcome to my second Christmas related project.
Have you ever received a really boring Christmas card? Have you ever sat there and thought to yourself "If only there were a little video game on this card that I could play..." Well ponder no more because that card is here!
This instructable will show you how to make your very own retro video game Christmas card which can be made for less than $10. All you need is some time, some soldering know how and roughly $10 in your wallet.
Please view this youtube video to get the main idea of this project:
There are essentially two main parts to building this project.
1. Soldering all the parts to the vero board (experimenters board)
2. Making the card itself (this is where you can get creative)
The game is titled "Santas Scramble" and is played within 64 pixels on an 8x8 LED matrix display. You play santa (a red dot) who is frantically flying around the world in order to get all of the presents delivered to the children in time for Christmas, the only problem is that he has flown into a dangerous maze. Your job is to steer santa up and down the screen in order to avoid the oncoming obsticles. Be careful, the further you get through the game, the faster it gets. If you crash then it is - GAME OVER -
There are two different designs below and I must apologise for my lack of arts and crafts ability. My strong point is the electronics side of things...
Anyway - lets get started shall we!
Have you ever received a really boring Christmas card? Have you ever sat there and thought to yourself "If only there were a little video game on this card that I could play..." Well ponder no more because that card is here!
This instructable will show you how to make your very own retro video game Christmas card which can be made for less than $10. All you need is some time, some soldering know how and roughly $10 in your wallet.
Please view this youtube video to get the main idea of this project:
There are essentially two main parts to building this project.
1. Soldering all the parts to the vero board (experimenters board)
2. Making the card itself (this is where you can get creative)
The game is titled "Santas Scramble" and is played within 64 pixels on an 8x8 LED matrix display. You play santa (a red dot) who is frantically flying around the world in order to get all of the presents delivered to the children in time for Christmas, the only problem is that he has flown into a dangerous maze. Your job is to steer santa up and down the screen in order to avoid the oncoming obsticles. Be careful, the further you get through the game, the faster it gets. If you crash then it is - GAME OVER -
There are two different designs below and I must apologise for my lack of arts and crafts ability. My strong point is the electronics side of things...
Anyway - lets get started shall we!
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Signing UpStep 1Gathering together the required parts.
As stated in the introduction, there are essentially two main parts to this instructable.
1. Building the electronic circuit
2. Constructing the card
Here is what you will need for the electronic circuit:
- 1 x pic 16f648a microcontroller
- 1 x 7442 (1 of 10 decoder IC)
- 2 x cr2032 batteries
- 2 x cr2032 battery holders
- 1 x 32 hole by 23 hole piece of veroboard / strip board
- 2 x push buttons
- 1 x 8x8 bi-colour LED matrix display
- 9 x 150 ohm resistors 1/4 watt
- 2 x 10k ohm resistors 1/4 watt
- length of enamel wire (the really thin wire with a coating of enamel for insulation)
- shorter length of single core wire
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- scalpel (or sharp knife)
- solder wick (optional but handy if you make a soldering error)
- Flux (optional but helps with soldering)
- pic microcontroller programmer
here is what you will need for the card:
- paper (all sorts of colours to make it more interesting)
- thin cardboard
- thick corrugated cardboard (the cardboard that packing boxes are made from)
- glue stick
- double sided tape
- sticky tape
- scalpel (or sharp knife)
- scissors
- what ever else you can think of to make a nice looking card
Handy Hints:
- Pay a visit to sure electronics webstore where you can buy a lot of 10 Led matrix displays for around $8.60 this makes them 86c each!
- ebay is a great place to buy electronic components. Make sure you do a worldwide search since postage is normally quite cheap for lightweight components.
- Head on over to microchip.com and sign up to their online store. Then you can buy parts directly from them. For example here in Australia it would cost me $10 for a 16f648a microcontroller. But if I buy them from microchip they are just over $1.
- You can also request free samples from microchip. I think you can get about 6 free samples a month. This has been very handy for me in experimenting with different chips.
1. Building the electronic circuit
2. Constructing the card
Here is what you will need for the electronic circuit:
- 1 x pic 16f648a microcontroller
- 1 x 7442 (1 of 10 decoder IC)
- 2 x cr2032 batteries
- 2 x cr2032 battery holders
- 1 x 32 hole by 23 hole piece of veroboard / strip board
- 2 x push buttons
- 1 x 8x8 bi-colour LED matrix display
- 9 x 150 ohm resistors 1/4 watt
- 2 x 10k ohm resistors 1/4 watt
- length of enamel wire (the really thin wire with a coating of enamel for insulation)
- shorter length of single core wire
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- scalpel (or sharp knife)
- solder wick (optional but handy if you make a soldering error)
- Flux (optional but helps with soldering)
- pic microcontroller programmer
here is what you will need for the card:
- paper (all sorts of colours to make it more interesting)
- thin cardboard
- thick corrugated cardboard (the cardboard that packing boxes are made from)
- glue stick
- double sided tape
- sticky tape
- scalpel (or sharp knife)
- scissors
- what ever else you can think of to make a nice looking card
Handy Hints:
- Pay a visit to sure electronics webstore where you can buy a lot of 10 Led matrix displays for around $8.60 this makes them 86c each!
- ebay is a great place to buy electronic components. Make sure you do a worldwide search since postage is normally quite cheap for lightweight components.
- Head on over to microchip.com and sign up to their online store. Then you can buy parts directly from them. For example here in Australia it would cost me $10 for a 16f648a microcontroller. But if I buy them from microchip they are just over $1.
- You can also request free samples from microchip. I think you can get about 6 free samples a month. This has been very handy for me in experimenting with different chips.
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PIC16F648A-I/P, PIC16F648A-I/SO, or PIC16F648A-I/SS?
To make sure, you can cut them with a stanley knife and then use a flat blade screwdriver (a small one) to make the channel a bit wider.
Oh and btw your accent is awesome ^-^
Thanks
have you got your pic in the circuit when you try and program it? What programmer are you using?
Also, why are you not using resistors with your LED's? If you don't use resistors, the internal resistance of the chips will need to drop the rest of the voltage (which increases the chips power consumption) which will most probably burn it out pretty quickly.
As for the PCB design, it looks very different from the schematic. Did you get the schematic from here:
http://www.instructables.com/files/orig/F9A/MK4K/G3KY0ONB/F9AMK4KG3KY0ONB.png
www.bradsprojects.com then click on pic tutorials and then click on tutorial 4
how do you connect it
Thanks.
They are all the same chip, just different packaging (through hole DIP / Surface mount etc...)
Would you mind posting the source code?
Please?!?!
This game is actually just a copy of the great race (a game I came up with a few years ago)
you can check out all the details of that including source code on my electronics site:
www.bradsprojects.com/index.php
And by the way, responding to a comment in less than 72 hours is a pretty friggin' prompt response in my opinion. Thanks again.
Oh, and might I suggest putting a link to your website in the body of the Instructable. Maybe say something like "you can find this game and others like it at www.bradsprojects.com/index.php"
I had a look at the datasheet for the part number you were looking at (for the decoder) but unfortunately it doesnt have inverted outputs. If you did want to use that particular chip then you would either need to add an inverter to each of the eight outputs that you will use or you would have the outputs drive a transistor which would then goto the LED cathodes.
An alternate part you could also use is the 74138 this is a 1 of 8 decoder that would work just as well as the 1 of 10 decoder. (because the circuit only uses 8 anyway)
Let me know how you go.
You then have eight outputs, all of which will be a logic 1 (high) except for the one that corresponds to the combination of 1's and 0's on the input.
For example, if you put 000 on the input then output 0 would be a logic 0 and all the rest (1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7) would all be logic 1's.
we use this logic 0 to ground one column of cathodes at a time.
you will also notice on the 74138 that there are three 'enable' lines. two of which are inverted. They really are only there if you are going to use multiple 74138 chips. All you need to do is ground the two inverted 'enable inputs' and connect the non-inverted 'enable' input to Vcc. This will 'activate' the chip.
This would work just fine with an AVR microcontroller, unfortunately I havn't really dealt with them at all so I'm not sure how to convert it.
Regards