Final Project Journal

The maze board walls and fittings were made using Laser-Cut Maze Designer website .

This website using gives you the board with the fitting and the walls separately with numbers engraved on the board and the walls to assemble it easily like a puzzle .

The website has some edits that you need to adjust to ensure a good result

1- Print mode : is either floor and wall which means it will give you fittings on the sides of the floor to put walls in it , put single sheet will have only fittings for the walls , in my case because I already have my own walls I chose single sheet

2- Number of rows & number of columns : is a personal preference and related to the level of difficultly of the maze also could relate to the overall size of the board sometimes

3- Wall height : The height of the walls from the floor of the maze. This should be tall enough so that a marble rolling through the maze won't bounce over the walls.

4- Material thickness : The thickness of the material being used to cut out the maze pieces because I’m using plywood the thickness is 3mm

5- Don’t forget to adjust the units

6- Hall width : space between walls. This should be at least as big as the diameter of a marble that would be rolling through the maze.

7- Printer configuration : needs to be adjusted based on the kind of laser cutter used in my case the laser cutter takes a sheet with width 500 X 300 mm

8- Rectangle configuration adjust it based on the size of the board that you want , I wanted the fittings inside a 25 x17 cm rectangle

9- Click generate , but note the downloaded file is SVG so you would need to convert it into DXF .

My prototype was made using only laser cutting , so that means that each side needs to be turned into dxf .

- First I made a new component from Assembly

- Then I started making a sketch and clinking (p) project the component onto the sketch , It will give you an identical sketch of the final edits .

- Then after projecting (make sure projection link is not checked)

- you click finish sketch and save the sketch as dxf

- After making a dxf for all the components .

I started adjusting them into laser work , then you click download .

I chose the suitable adapter by looking into the needed voltage for each component in their data sheet and most of the used components needs only 5v or less , but for some reason using the 5v adapter wasn’t supplying enough current so I used the mobile charger with 5v output and it worked amazing

the code includes a lot of functions each function will be explained in order of it’s execution on the real simulation . the libraries used are metro library because I needed to have multiple actions execute at the same time , liquidcrystal _i2c for the lcd , varspeedservo it’s a new modified library so that I can control the speed of the servos as much as possible . below the libraries are declared variables that will be explained later on .

Function initiate

In function initiate we display “MAZE GAME ” then move the cursor to the next line “BY NORHAN”

To scroll the written string to the left we call function lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() which only shifts by one position so in order to shift until the end of the lcd I did a for loop that counts 13 times , after it finishes , the same thing happens but to the right side by calling function lcd.scrollDisplayRight()

Function

Running_biss ()

This function is called after the initiate function , this function uses the custom character generator that turns the drawn character into a code by dividing each byte into 8 bits and declaring whether the bit is high or low based on the shape , but for this animation around 50 byte functions are executed after each other without any delay to create the illusion of movement .

Function two modes : it displays on the first line “PLAY VIA ” and on the second line “a) joystick b) app ” then it calls function game_mode() ;

Function game_mode()

First the code is stuck in this endless loop while the joystick button is not pressed , after it’s is pressed there are three options either the user moved to the right and pressed or to the left and pressed it will display his chosen mode , but if he pressed for example ate the center or up or down , the function will keep calling itself which is something called recursive function . but in case of joystick mode , variable mode will be 1 , incase app mode it will be 2 .

Function number _players displays the two options one / two then calls functions choose which has the same logic as game_mode ,

But in the one player mode it calls function player then function one_player

Function player displays a three second counter until the game starts

Function one_player displays the score of the player if first round then it’s already initialized as zero , if it’s two player with two rounds based on the round number (post ) he displays the player(1/2) score

Now the code has nothing to do but to go to the void loop ()

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In void loop() we will be using metro functions so that we can have the lcd and the servo motors work at the same time , first condition is if mode == 1 (joystick mode) and the servo_delay .check()

Note that : servo_delay was initialized previously (pic)

Which is a function that when calls starts the counting( delay ) and after it finishes it returns one ,

When the condition is satisfied it enters the next condition which prevents the joystick from returning to it’s orginal position after moving the stick ( because the joystick has a self-centered retract ) it returns to the center position after moving which would be pointless in this game that’s why this condition only allows movement if the analog values are anywhere but the center , then it takes the reading and maps it from 10 to 1023 to an angle between -20 , 20 .

The same with the yaxis , after that function slowmove moves the board an angle +/- from the orginal position

If the mode = 2 ( app mode ) it has the same logic but here we use function Serial.parseINT that gives bytes and when stops returns \n , function constrain does the same as mapping but if the value is lower than min value it returns minimum value , if larger than max , it returns max , if in between it returns the same value

My project is a maze game that is controlled using a joystick /APP and can move in the x-axis and the

y-axis , using two servo motors , one is placed on the side stand and the other is placed on the board wall, the idea of the game is that it can be played either by one player or by two players . The one player mode had five rounds each round displays a countdown timer for the player and his total score , if the player failed to score at all the lcd will display “GAME OVER LOSER” and an angry character made by me , if he got to score even one the lcd will display “ur score is … ” with a cute character made also by me .

in the two player mode : there are two rounds , the lcd whose turn it’s so that the score will be counted for each player correctly . Then when the time of the two rounds is up it displays whose is the winner or if neither it displays “BOTH OF You are losers ”

Some of the ideas that my instructor (Mohand) suggested and I found very useful

- To press the bearing between the sheet and a mount with the same diameter then restraining the movement by making another two mounts with a smaller diameter but bigger than 8mm for the axis

- Also to have the joystick positioned using long screws and adjusting the position using two nuts

- Also the laser maze cutter I didn’t know about it and my instructor (Menna) had previous experience using it and she explained all the details .

- This was my first time using the metro library ( instructor Ahmed Saeed) which was really lifechanging xd because now I know how to have multiple actions execute at the same time

- I helped my classmates with projecting their components and how to save as dxf and inserting components into the current file

- The most important is not to waste 3 hours of your life drawing a maze on fusion while you can generate the laser cut maze on a website

- Is to be more considerate with the components placement in a box and have it more spacious for the wires and the i2c of the lcd , just have more space than the needed

- Also if you want a component to be inserted into a mount don’t make it the exact same size of the projection but make a smaller offset by 0.2 or 0.1 makes a difference

- Colour code the components while wiring saves a lot of time later on

- Try as much as you can not to use many delays

- Make the mapping angle smaller because you only need to move the ball a little by little