Contact Information
Country: Belgium
Year Submitted: 2018
University: Group T KU Leuven
List of Team Members:
Matthias Baes 2020
Stijn Castelyns 2020
Tom de Boeck 2020
Pieter-Jan Delvaux 2020
Joram de Vos 2020
Ewout Geukens 2020
Emile Vogels 2020
Faculty Advisers: Pieter Spaepen
Main Contact Email Address: emile.vogels@student.kuleuven.be
Project Information
Title: Cockroach game
Description: A game designed for children to make them solve simple math equations while having the fun aspect of a game and trying to win from your opponent. The goal of our cockroachgame will be to have as less as possible cockroaches in your own collection tray. These cockroaches are little vibrating motors with rubber legs by which they can move in our game field. The game can be played by 2 people, or in 2 teams of 1-2 persons. Our game field is comparable to a football field. On both sides of it, the football goals are replaced by holes, in which cockroaches can fall. In the front of every hole, there is a defence line, which can be activated by his owner. This will happen if the owner has made the right calculations with the numbers displayed by the disk in the middle of our game field. The defence line, consisting of 2 separate walls, comes out of the bottom of the gaming field, this will result in a defend advantage of having less cockroaches near your own hole.
As said before, in the middle of our gameboard, there’s a rotating disk on which the numbers 0-9 are engraved. The disk rotates and every few seconds, there’s a ‘ping’-sound while the disk stops spinning. The arrow then indicates a number (which both players should remember) before the process of spinning starts again. With these numbers, both players have to make calculations: adding, subtracting, multiplying. By first calculating the right answer of the previous calculation, one can activate his defence. Giving this player the defence advantage.
Each player has a computer where he enters his answers and where the required calculation is mentioned. This display also shows the score during the game. Besides these 2 computers, a third one is the control unit of the whole game, which sends the right signals to the game board and the computer of player 1 and player 2.
Products: USB 6008 in combination with a PCB with H-bridge.
The Challenge:
The technical challenge was to create a prototype of a small automated system. The topic and aim of this automated system was left up-to us. We wanted to make a game were children could learn how to do math equations in a simple and fun way. The challenge was that the game couldn’t be to hard and that even if your bad at math you still have a chance to win. Because we wanted a competition game we needed separate interfaces for the competitors.
Since we did not have any Labview experience when we started the project, we were also faced with several management challenges. How can we go about to move forward on the project while we are also still learning on how to program? How can avoid the typical situation of a student project that a few experts in the team are doing the bulk of the work.
The Solution:
Both the technical challenge of having multiple interfaces as well as the management challenges of learning how to program and having several people contribute to the final project were well met by the concept and implementation of the Labview network published shared variables. By using the network shared variables we could easily create a separate interfaces on separate computers. It would even allow us to extend the game to any number of players as to have teams of children compete.
Surprisingly enough we found out that using the network published shared variables also helped us substantially to collaborate while writing the Labview code. Whenever we wanted the vi’s of two team members to communicate, we introduced a shared variable. This has helped us in learning to divide large problems into manageable portions. The implementation of the shared variables forced us to be specific and precise about what was communicated between the vi’s. Whenever some-o ne was working on his own part he could simply switch to a local version of the shared variables and switch back to the networked version when collaborating in group.
Link to Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGQKqhgu2YU&feature=youtu.be
