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Bigger, better, stronger.
Ok, so it's been about four days since the last post, but that's because it's been real busy here at Nerd Towers, trying to get the Game Score Keeping Device working. Well, it was already working, but with very limited functionality and a tiny amount of memory (it was squeezed onto a 16F628A microchip after all).
But these last few days haven't been spent idly lounging around in the glorious sunshine we've had lately. Maybe just a bit. And of course there was the small matter of helping out laying the new surface at the Brighton and Hove Petanque Club on Tuesday.
But the good news is that we've very nearly completed another project! Yay!
Here it is on the prototyping breadboard. It's using a beefy 18F series microcontroller and has had loads of new functionality added.
The device is now dual-function. You can use it to record scores for games like petanque/boules, darts, even football! But it also has a special "golf mode" allowing you to download course details (par score for each hole) and to record your progress as you play a round. Golf can be played either against an opponent or in new "solo play" mode. The display changes slightly but the end result is the same: for each hole you record the par score for the hole, your score and your opponents score (if using two-player mode). These scores can then be downloaded to your PC and even uploaded to a web site, to allow you to monitor your progress over a period of time.
There's even a cute message at the end of each hole, telling you whether you've scored a "birdie" or a "bogey" (or one of many other golf terms that only mean something to the initiated).
The most difficult part of the project was introducing an external EEPROM chip.
This uses I2C protocol to talk to the PIC microcontroller. Getting the data read/write signal synchronised was quite tricky, because the micro runs as 20Mhz, whereas the eeprom can't go much beyond 400khz.
A full description of how it was made to work is here on the projects page.
But these last few days haven't been spent idly lounging around in the glorious sunshine we've had lately. Maybe just a bit. And of course there was the small matter of helping out laying the new surface at the Brighton and Hove Petanque Club on Tuesday.
But the good news is that we've very nearly completed another project! Yay!
Here it is on the prototyping breadboard. It's using a beefy 18F series microcontroller and has had loads of new functionality added.
The device is now dual-function. You can use it to record scores for games like petanque/boules, darts, even football! But it also has a special "golf mode" allowing you to download course details (par score for each hole) and to record your progress as you play a round. Golf can be played either against an opponent or in new "solo play" mode. The display changes slightly but the end result is the same: for each hole you record the par score for the hole, your score and your opponents score (if using two-player mode). These scores can then be downloaded to your PC and even uploaded to a web site, to allow you to monitor your progress over a period of time.
There's even a cute message at the end of each hole, telling you whether you've scored a "birdie" or a "bogey" (or one of many other golf terms that only mean something to the initiated).
The most difficult part of the project was introducing an external EEPROM chip.
This uses I2C protocol to talk to the PIC microcontroller. Getting the data read/write signal synchronised was quite tricky, because the micro runs as 20Mhz, whereas the eeprom can't go much beyond 400khz.
A full description of how it was made to work is here on the projects page.
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