The Pyramid's Secret: Arduino Electronic Board Game

wt5001m02-28P - MP3 Player

24LC256 - 32K EEPROM

Arduino Nano R3

Audio isolation transformer

Pam8403 - Audio Amplifier

Max7221 - Led Driver

<p >In 2015, my son had to make a board game for a middle school science fair, and the theme was Ancient Egypt. I figured it out was an opportunity to introduce him to electronics. </p><p >My initial suggestion was to replace the conventional dice with an electronic dice, but my kid and his classmates are very creative, so when their ideas began to emerge, I didn’t want to limit their ideas. Therefore, the things became a little more complex.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/56d0e2fd-aa9f-40f8-a6ce-eb522943db83.jpg /><figcaption>Team working</figcaption></figure><p >They did the project concept, game and enclosure design and I helped them with my electronics expertise.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/9e0d842d-0a76-4271-83c7-8acda86808b6.jpg /><figcaption>First prototype</figcaption></figure><p >The board chosen for this project was Arduino Nano, that controls some other modules and circuits (display, MP3 player, buttons, and LEDs). </p><p >Just like any schoolwork, they had to do a lot of research about ancient Egyptian history, because they needed to formulate a lot of questions for the quiz that was part of the game. They also had a lot of work to drawing the map of the board, especially considering they used MS-Word to do it. It was printed on vinyl adhesive.​​</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/760dbdb4-2db7-45e4-8704-c6a4a85e9794.jpg /><figcaption>Game board</figcaption></figure><p >For the enclosure design, they were inspired by pinball machines. They wanted to make it with a large area for the map and an inclined display, which also hides the pharaoh’s sarcophagus, and when a player reaches the goal, some LEDs are lit, revealing the &#34;secret treasure&#34;.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/eedc9775-fecf-4f06-9bd2-6539cda52cc9.jpg /><figcaption>Sarcophagus revealed when someone wins the game</figcaption></figure><p >The enclosure was made of plastic (polyethylene) and acrylic sheets, due to its ease of cutting and folding.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/ac06b56f-7a84-464c-bafb-c8f3c0ec6135.jpg /><figcaption>Making custom enclosure</figcaption></figure><p >The circuit design was created with Fritzing software. I do not like to use jumpers, so usually I make double-sided PCBs. But, as the time was short, I chose to simplify making single-side PCB, using toner transfer method.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/b31469fa-b7ef-4e85-b024-b0b836555a5a.jpg /><figcaption>PCB design</figcaption></figure><p >This project has 24 LEDs, so I had to use a multiplexer IC. The MAX7219 solved the LEDs problem, but caused a loud noise to come from the speakers. To fix this issue the MAX7219 was replaced by its “brother” MAX7221, which has protection against electro magnetic interference (EMI).</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/b98d45dc-f572-4f2e-a757-73c9296f43b0.jpg /><figcaption>PCB - Printed Circuit Board</figcaption></figure><p >The questions of the quiz are shown in a 20×4 LCD display as well as played through the speakers with the kids’ voices, which we recorded and distorted to sound scary like a mummy.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/a263dc4c-a239-4595-be9e-2905689b359e.JPG /><figcaption>Voice recording</figcaption></figure><p >The first programming challenge was to display portuguese accented characters. Despite the fact that the LCD display allowed 8 customizable characters, it wasn’t enough. So to work around this problem I had to dynamically load the custom characters as required.</p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/770fe02c-e218-4ec6-b3fd-59f555b184a1.jpg /><figcaption>Testing the LCD display</figcaption></figure><p ></p><figure><img src=https://projects.arduinocontent.cc/e793fc38-9ef4-440f-a120-b4caf724efcb.png /><figcaption>Final hardware</figcaption></figure><p >Another programming challenge I had to overcome was the Arduino 2KB RAM limitation, since I needed lot of memory to hold the quiz strings, which can neither be solved by progmem tricky. I had to store these strings into an external 32 KB EEPROM (Microchip 24LC256). I wrote some Arduino sketches that was executed once, to store these strings into EEPROM, and after it was retrieved by the main program, using their memory addresses.</p><p >After all, I think that Arduino Nano was pushed to its limits. More than that, only using an Arduino Mega.</p><p >From conception to finish, the project took 30 days.</p><p >Playing the game: </p><div class="se-component se-video-container __se__float-none" contenteditable="false" style="width: 100%;"><figure style="width: 100%; height: 56.25%; padding-bottom: 56.25%; margin: 0px;"><iframe frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/22LTTz00c54" data-proportion="true" data-percentage="100%,56.25%" data-size="100%,56.25%" data-align="none" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" data-index="0" data-file-size="0" data-origin="100%,56.25%"></iframe><figcaption contenteditable="true"><div>Playing the game</div></figcaption></figure></div><p >Testing video:</p><div class="se-component se-video-container __se__float-none" contenteditable="false" style="width: 100%;"><figure style="width: 100%; height: 56.25%; padding-bottom: 56.25%; margin: 0px;"><iframe frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dJfBCsZCKEY" data-proportion="true" data-percentage="100%,56.25%" data-size="100%,56.25%" data-align="none" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" data-index="0" data-file-size="0" data-origin="100%,56.25%"></iframe><figcaption contenteditable="true"><div>Gameplay testing</div></figcaption></figure></div><p ></p>

The Pyramid's Secret: Arduino Electronic Board Game

An Arduino board game designed to explore ancient Egypt.