TRON

Ibtasam Sharif

Ibtasam is currently a Masters student at Global Innovation Exchange, University of Washington. Ibtasam is a big fan of soccer and Real Madrid is his favorite team. You can find Ibtasam's contribution to this project here.

Amit Anand

Amit Anand is currently a Masters student at Global Innovation Exchange, University of Washington. Amit has also represented his country's national cricket team. You can more information about Amit's work on this project here.

Tron Disc is one of the most famous programmable artifact in both the game grid and the Tron system. Tron disc is also known as the identity disc and is in the form of a detachable glowing disc worn on the upper back. As part of the class project, we as a team decided to create a new version of the disc with multiple modes which are represented by different glowing colors along with the charging station for the Tron enthusiasts.

Below are the functional details of the Tron disc and the the base charging station

Tron Disc has 3 distinct modes that can be activated by pushing the disc button.

1. Offline Mode
2. Normal Mode
3. Ready to Fight Mode
4. Fierce Battle Mode

The LED strip is off when the disc is now switched on. Pressing the button once will power on the disc

In normal mode, the disc led strip is colored red. In the normal mode

In case of a fight, the master of the tron disc can press the button again to transition the disc into ready to fight mode. In this mode, the LED strip turns blue and is an indicator that the master of the disc is ready to fight.

By pressing the button for the third time, the disc enters the fierce battle mode and all disc powers gets activated. This is most advanced mode of the tron system and is advised to be used wisely

In default mode, the led of the charging station keeps blinking. When the tron disc is physically connected to the base station, it starts charging the tron disc. This is reflected by the change in color of the LED strips which turns light blue in this mode. Moreover, the light of the charging station also stabilizes during the charging.

As shown in the system architecture, the system consists of two independent modules, tron disc and the tron charging station. The tron disc consist of a led strip, a switch button, connectors and a portable battery whereas the charging station has an led along with connectors. Both the modules use audrino nano as a processioning unit.

The Tron disc is powered by a portable 9V battery which is connected to Audrino Nano's Vin (+ of battery) and Ground pins (- of battery). The LED strip and button is connected to Digital pins 2 and 4 of the processing unit. On the push of a button, the led strip is activated and the LED strip is given a high value to turn it on. We have used Adafruits Neopixel library for integrating the LED and all the internal processing is taken care by the library iteself. Button has 4 different states and with each push, the Tron disc changes its glowing pattern showing its different modes listed above. Digital pin 5 and 7 are connected to the butt connectors. Pin 7 is the output pin which is always sending a high pulse whereas pin 5 is an input pin which is waiting for a high pulse from the base charging station.

Audrino Nano of the base charging station is directly connected to power source through a usb cable. The LED of the base station is connected to the Digital pin 2 of the processing unit. The LED is always high and only blinks when the disc is attached to it. Similarly like the disc, the base charging station also has Pin 7 and 10 connected to the butt connectors. Pin 7 is the output pin which is always sending a high signal and pin 10 is the receiving pin of the charging station.

In order to make interaction between both the objects, bottom butt connectors are placed on both the disc and the charging station. The male connector is connected to its corresponding female connector which in turn is connected to the digital pin of the processing unit as described above. Hence, when the connector which is attached to pin 7 of the base is connected with the pin 5 of the disc, the current flows from base to the disc. Once the disc detects this flow, it puts the disc into charging mode. Similarly, when the disc connector of pin 7 is connected to the connector of pin 5 in base, the current travels from disc to base and the base detects it and blinks the LED.

https://github.com/ibtesam/Tron