Cornerstone of Engineering: Path Memorization Game
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Hardware Engineer
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Boston, MA
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Jan. - May. 2022
Background: My second term project for Cornerstone of Engineering was to build a game for a childrens' museum. My team decided to build a path memorization game inspired by the Nickelodeon tv show "Brain Surge". In this game, a random path would be generated and shown to the contestant. Once the player started to follow the path on the grid in front of them, the display would turn off. The player had to complete a 4x4 grid, followed by a 5x5 and a 6x6 all within 2 minutes. My team ended up winning Best Game of the Section.
Tasks: My main focus for this project was the design and manufacturing of the 36 pressure plates which all had to be working, durable, and easily replicated.
Skills Learned/Used:
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C++
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Arduino
Pressure Plate Design
Arduino Limitation: The simplest way to make a pressure plate is to basically make a large button. You have two conductive plates in the center of the button and when it is pushed, one live plate comes into contact with the ground plate and the circuit is closed. However, this would require 36 separate live inputs into the Arduino, which only has 14 inputs. To work around this, I decided to have the arduino read the row and the column of the activated plates. This simplified it to only 12 live inputs, 6 for the rows and 6 for the columns. To make this work the bottom part of the plate needed to have the row and column insulated from each other with we solved with a basic insulated wire as seen in the photo above.
Material Choice: The team had a financial constraint of 200 dollars. This meant that the plates would have to be simple and cheap. Cardboard was readily available and much cheaper than the plastics we looked at online. For the conductive material, we originally used tin foil because we already had some but switched to copper tape for its better conductivity and adhesive properties.
Example Gameplay