Game Console System Design Report

Description of Game Consoles

Our device is a simple game console but it has a different style. We will do more than one game console. We will try to do two consoles. The first one will be an IR sensor game console. There will be four IR sensors to observe the four directions. It will stand for W, A, S, D on keyboard. It will handle the games played with or can be played with these buttons.

The user will move his/her hand among those four sensors and corresponding lengths will produce different signals. These analog signals will come to our MCU and MCU will do the rest. It will act as a keyboard. The second one is the traditional joystick. The four directions will be the two axes. The user will use this joystick and the joystick sends our MCU its analog signals. These analog signals will be treated the same as in IR sensors.

This project is a good example of an embedded system and its devices because the task is very simple and it is not so complex to handle. A PC or mobile phone would be an overkill and too costly for this purpose. Therefore, it becomes meaningless to implement on such other devices.

Details

As it was mentioned, there will be signals and corresponding events. Our console devices are varied but the signals do not vary that much. Analog signals will be obtained from joystick and IR sensors. They will be the inputs. There will be five analog inputs at most. There are enough pins for that outputs coming from these analog inputs as keyboard buttons. For IR sensors, we decided to use GP2Y0E03. We have GP2Y0E02B as an alternative but as it is the older version, we will not prefer that. It is about 35 TL for one sensor. It has an interface in itself, so it's like a black box. The analog output is coming from the pin named ‘no2'. The GND and VDD are the pins named ‘no3' and ‘no1'. I gave the order from Robotistan. For the joystick, we planned to use a JoyStickX2 from Robotistan too. It has much better usability than the single one. I do not know whether the cross directions can be obtained by a single one. Since it is too cheap, it can be bought as well. These two joysticks cost approximately 30TL.

Software

Our software will deal with the inputs from the sensors and convert them into a keyboard-like input for the computer itself. The sensors will produce analog signals for the events. According to their pin numbers, we will assign them a button. In that way, a simple game that is played with W, A, S, D, and space can be played. There are tasks for adjusting the received signals from sensors and the button signal that will be sent. The jobs of the pins are almost the same and that task can be a separate function because otherwise there will be lots of code duplication. After handling the pin signals, we should handle the computer side. Software is needed there as well. To send which key is pressed, we should use the mbed official libraries. USBKeyboard library can be used. The whole system will work like a big if statement. We will signal the buttons according to their pin numbers.

Implementation

Software often splits into several distributions. By implementing and testing these distributions, they can be integrated with each other easily. In our situation, we should first start by testing the sensors. For the IR sensors, we can observe the response time and length for playability. If the response time is not enough, we may consider another design choice.

Secondly, joystick should be tested. For testing these two sensors, a text file can be used. Since they are just doing the press operation, it would appear on the file. After these tests, it becomes ready to move on to implement the rest. For the further implementation details, ISR can be used since the code will work when some action happens.

Engineering Challenges

As an IR sensor will be used calibration is very important. User should be able to simulate the key that he/she wants without having too much trouble. Therefore, we will need to spend a lot of time calibrating the sensors for ideal distance for our desired action.

Furthermore, as the LPC1768 board is very expensive, we will need to be very careful about voltages. Because, the board is susceptible to the damage, and we will use sensors that may or may not have the same voltage as the board.

User Experience

For users, it is an unusual experience and if it can be implemented in an improved way, it is likely to be upgraded so that it can be used with Virtual Reality devices as a peripheral. Because these devices will help users navigate in their virtual reality in a more immersed way as one of them is touch-free. Especially it can be used for navigating maps or tables and such.

Furthermore, they will help users navigate through their old games in a fairly new sense which helps to enhance the experience and incentivize them to play those games. It will have a fairly easy learning curve.