Just two days coding and as well as a golf-score-recording-device, we now have the ScoreSure Petanque Pro: a device for recording scores after each "end" in a game commonly known as "boules". (The game itself is called petanque, the boules are the little heavy silver things that get thrown around: this is different to most games, like football, darts, bowls etc., where the game takes its name from the equipment used).
By creating our first ScoreSure Petanque Pro device, we've managed to dovetail beautifully into the Score Results website which is almost complete (since the first lot of results on the Score Results website are all for the Brighton and Hove Petanque Mixed Doubles League.

As well of lots of development in recent weeks, theres' also been talk of getting the local university involved in market research and product development. That means it's time to get the device off the breadboard/prototyping hardware, and packaged up into something that you can hold in your hands! We've been talking about doing this kind of thing for ages now, but this time it's different. This time, we've been given a deadline!


So here's the PCB layout of the shield. A few of the PIC pins have had to be re-mapped. The reason for this is because we're going to make up a few "blank" devices - Nokia screen, batteries, eeprom and PIC, and then program them afterwards. This means that SMT (surface mount technology) can be used for production at a later stage, because the PICs can be programmed in place, using ICSP (in-circuit serial programming).

In fact, it turns out that the programmer we use for dropping code onto our PIC chips uses this anyway - it's a socket-based programmer (see below) but it also has an ICSP header for programming chips this way.

(incidentally if anyone else has one of these programmers, they can be used to write code to both 16F and 18F chips - the way we do it is to keep two different versions of firmware on two different 16F628A chips. Simply swap in the firmware you need (did you notice that the programmer uses a PIC chip itself?) and run the appropriate software. We use DonkeyProg for the 18F series of chips and DIYPack25 for burning to the 16F chips.

The reason for remapping the pins is to make sure that the MCLR, RB6 and RB7 pins are isolated. These are the pins needed to program the chip in place. It is possible to keep using these pins and build simple isolator circuits for when programming takes place (programming requires raising the voltage on the MCLR pin to about 13v so you need to protect the rest of your circuit) but we found it easier to just keep these pins clear and only use them for ICS programming. On the PCB layout we run MCLR, 5v, ground, RB6 and RB7 to a pin header row and then use an old IDE (hard drive) cable to connect to the ICSP header on the PIC programmer.

We've just completed our first test and it was successful! We've managed to program an 18F2455 chip without removing it from the breadboard and dropping it into the socket. So there's nothing stopping us now from building a few "shields" which clip onto the back of the Nokia colour screen from NuElectronics and programming them at a later date!



(for the observant amongst you, comparing this photo to previous ones, you'll see that some extra wires have been added - and the Nokia board removed for testing - which cross over the PIC and create a 5-pin connection on the left hand side of the breadboard: the red wire from MCLR which was previously connected to 5v is now the programming voltage wire and the MCLR fuse on the chip has been turned off so that pin no longer requires 5v to keep the PIC running. The 5v and ground pins have been carried over to the ICSP connection on the left of the breadboard and pins RB6 and RB7 have been taken across via two yellow wires.)

Because the PIC can be programmed without physically putting it into the programmer, there's nothing stopping us from making a circuit board and soldering everything in place. Let's crack open the Ferric Chloride and get etching....

That's right - the fantastic Score Results website (a partner site for the soon-to-be released ScoreSure website) now includes code so that you can display your own league tables on a blog/website as a widget. Just a couple of lines of code (copied and pasted) and you're away!

The trickiest part is the use of an iframe (and its auto-resizing code) to display the league table. Why iframes and not ajax (the most common method suggested when resizing iframes becomes an issue?) Well, every entry in the league table can be clicked on, to display team members, member profiles and so on. Although possible, writing ajax functions and callbacks to handle every clickable link would be a nightmare - iframes are just easier to implement!

The headache comes when you want to include the league table (hosted at www.scoreresults.co.uk) in an iframe hosted on another domain. Obviously scripting across domains isn't possible, so there's a bit of trickery involved, to make sure that the iframe is resized after content has been loaded into it.

Here's an example of the widget in use. The league table below was included in this blog by simply pasting the following two lines of code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.scoreresults.co.uk/js/leaguetable_widget.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">drawFrame("2DD610F1CA7342A0BEF9E50540F2FFB5");</script>

A big part of the ScoreSure product range is the website where players can upload results from games and keep a history of their progress over time. By collating players scores, it's also possible to maintain and display league tables (see earlier post) and so on, which has lead to us using a second domain for this service: www.scoreresults.co.uk.

The website is almost complete and should already be useable for anyone wanting to give it a whirl.

Here's the first photos of our ScoreSure Golf Pro device (yes, still in development!) running off a 400mAh 3.7v li-polymer rechargeable battery. We think it looks the business! And of course, using a rechargeable battery (whether eventually a li-po or a li-ion) means lots more possibilities for the enclosure, since we no longer have to worry about battery flaps and making the inside accessible.

With the Brighton and Hove Petanque Open Triples results in and recorded, it made sense to use them to try out the new score results website. Progress on this side of the ScoreSure range of products has been slow and steady. To date, results entry has been completed, along with an "invite-a-buddy" system of encouraging people to create their own online profiles.

In progress is a results API to allow anyone to display their results in a league table format, on their own website/blog, using a few simple lines of copy-n-paste code (the same way YouTube embed video idea works).

Below is an example of the Brighton And Hove Open Triples qualifying round results, using the new ScoreSure Results API:

The code used to display the league table here has been superceded. Changes to the Score Results website mean the method originally used to draw the league table no longer works. See later posts for details about how the league table can be included as a blog "widget"

It uses an iFrame to load external content from the scoreresults.co.uk website. In this example, the league table is drawn by putting http://www.scoreresults.co.uk/leaguetable.asp?tournamentid=CA40F460811E4D1FB47A706A4217972A into the iFrame. When hosted on a site where script uploads are possible, it is also possible to have the iframe resize automatically, to fit the frame contents. A simple example of this can be found here.
(you should see that as links are clicked, the iframe grows and shrinks as necessary so that ugly scrollbars are not needed).

From the results league table, it should be possible to drill down and look at each team's results history, individual player profiles and player results histories.

• Click on a tournament to view the league table standing for that tournament (knockout tournaments haven't been coded yet, but given that the final stage of the BHPC Triples was a form of knockout, this will be done very soon!)
• Click on a team name to see all the people that make up that team and to see previous results for that team (each team is specific to a single tournament so all results for one team always relate to just one tournament).
• Click on a player's name to see which team(s) they belong to, which tournaments they have taken part in, and a history of all results for this player, whether individually or as part of a team, across all tournaments.

Obviously some tidying up needs to be completed, and routines put in place to stop anyone accidentally (or maliciously!) entering rogue data which might break the website. But to date, progress has been pretty good and it's encouraging to see how the whole thing is starting to shape up.

There was a card from the post office, hidden under the welcome mat at Nerd Towers, saying that they'd been delivered a few days ago. So after a quick trip to the sorting office, they were proudly displayed on one of our workbenches. Here's a photo of the prototype batteries with charge circuits, from Xing at NuElectronics:



The charge circuits include over/under voltage protection, to keep the li-po cells operating within safe limits as well as a step-up converter, to provide a regulated 5v output from the 3.7v cell. As you can see from the photo, they're just being charged up at the minute. As soon as they're ready for use, we'll see how they perform (with our SureScore Golf device). We'll try one with our current device (which includes software-controlled auto-standby after two minutes of inactivity) and one with a modified device with no auto-standby code: this should give us a good idea of the kinds of times we can expect our devices to run for between charges in both "normal" and "continuous" use modes.

While waiting for the arrival of the lipos from NuElectronics there's not much we can do except, perhaps, the usual thing, which is to jump off and do something else for a while!

A big part of the ScoreSure range will be the online facilites - score "store" (see what we did there) as well as game playback features (where supported). So the ScoreSure website is getting a bit of work done on it over the next few days.

Also, about to start is the new mixed-doubles season at the Brighton and Hove Petanque Club and to coincide with this, the club website has had a spanky new makeover.
The new season starts on 5th September, which might be a little bit early to try out the new ScoreSure Petanque Edition but with a bit of luck, it'll be in regular use before the Autumn sets in and the weather takes a turn for the worst!

As coding for the ScoreSure Golf Pro game score keeping device comes to a close (a few more days testing should see it finished) thoughts are already turning to enclosures and presentation.

The initial idea was to place a PP3 battery (or block of 4xAAA batteries) alongside one edge of the circuit board, effectively placing the screen in the middle of the device (think original Game Boy Advance handhelds). Even with a relatively bulky battery pack, the overall footprint would still be quite small



Maplin stock a handheld enclosure with battery compartment which, on first appearance looks like a perfect fit for the PCB. The only issue is that, in a plain black oblong shaped box, it might look a little "plain".



However, such enclosures also include a recess on the front panel, which is ideally suited to adding your own keypad/graphic. Robot Steve has designed a range of prototypes for the ScoreSure range of devices (each type of device could be housed in a similar enclosure, each with a differing facia).



Even though it's very early days, such designs are very encouraging.
There are still a few decisions which may alter the enclosure requirements (e.g. whether using a 7.4v rechargeable lipo battery and USB charging circuit, in place of AAA rechargeables is a suitable option) but hopfully it won't be too long before we're back to etching circuit boards and making up prototypes to actually try out on the golf course!

Well actually, back to the more generic type of game scoring device. While RobotSteve gets on with making some rather smashing looking servo controller boards I've been coding yet more for the golf device.

To date we've got

• eeprom driven menus
• up to 4 player support
• Edit player names
• Edit player parameters (handicap and golf tees)
• eeprom driven bitmaps
• Nokia-type joystick support

.
Something to look out for with these Nokia breakout boards is running them at under-voltage.
I left my PP3 (9v) battery connected to the display all night and in the morning the battery was only giving out 7v. This meant - and I've yet to work out why - that only 4.3v was coming out of the voltage regulator, instead of the full 5v (not very regulated then!).
At this voltage, the Nokia screen (which usually requires 5v to drive it) would reset intermittently. This would sometimes also cause the pic micro to reset too. So behaviour was very unpredictable. Also, because of the lower supply voltage, the joystick values did not read true, and the logic to decide which button was pressed did not always work either (with the effect that the menu selector would appear to pick random entries from the list, instead of the one immediately above/below the highlighted entry).

Below is a video showing Nokia development so far.
It shows how eeprom-driven menus can move control onto a new screen (screen refreshing is slow because we're reading bitmap bytes from eeprom at just 400khz, not a the full 20Mhz that the chip can run at) and also how to edit player details.

Once perfected, these techniques can be used as the basis for other game scoring devices - after all, most games involve picking one or more players, entering their names, and providing some extra information (such as handicap/tee preference in golf, maybe boule weight or team position - pointer, shooter, middle - for petanque and so on).

Work is almost complete on the online golf course editor.
Below is the link to a preview version of the editor.
http://www.scoresure.co.uk/golf/coursedetails.asp?courseid=ABCDEFG&holeno=1

Meanwhile, the first golf-oriented menu and bitmap has found its way onto the Nokia screen. Here is the main menu for Score Sure Golf Pro:

There have been some exciting developments with our Score Sure Golf Pro game scoring device recently: namely that we've managed to get a full-colour Nokia 6610 128x128 display working with a PIC18F2455!

What does that mean?
For our ScoreSure range of devices, it means the hunt for a stable, decent screen is finally over! It also means the whole thing will fit into a much smaller enclosure, making it much more "pocket-friendly" and therefore more likely to gain acceptance. There were concerns, after seeing the original device actually working on a 128x64 mono glcd, that it might be getting a bit big and bulky. Of course, it also means we now how a full-colour display (although it'll still mainly be used as a mono device, due to memory/storage constraints!) but the odd splash of colour here and there won't go amiss!

It also means that there's now a library of PIC-based functions available for drawing bitmaps, writing text/displaying fonts AND creating menus. Readers of earlier posts will see that we've already had monochrome bitmaps displayed - the bug that stopped rending the image properly came from the VB app used to convert the image into a sequence of bytes and NOT the PIC rendering code (so the list of bytes you see in that example cause a white line to appear under the golfers feet).



Using the work done with an earlier GLCD the Nokia 6610 can also display strings of text. Unlike mono GLCD displays, where a vertical "slice" of 8 pixels for each character is sent in a single byte, the Nokia 6610 uses a single byte PER pixel. So that means breaking each character down into 5 vertical slices, then looping through each byte, and checking the status of each bit in the byte.
If the bit is set, the value for the "foreground" colour is sent - if the bit is not set or zero, the value for the background colour is sent to the display.
Thus strings of text are always drawn inside a box and you need to match the box background colour with the background colour of the display to avoid having big stripes of colour all over the screen.

To make our display more readable on the Nokia 6610, the fonts have been redesigned. Each is still 5x8 pixels, but this time a single pixel spacing remains at the bottom of each character. The character height has also increased by a pixel.
Below is a screenshot of how the characters were drawn using a homemade VB app to convert pixels into byte-slices:



The fact that strings are drawn inside boxes can be exploited for drawing menus.
By setting the background colour to one different to the colour of the display, when a string of text is drawn, it appears to be inside a coloured box. It is easy to imagine that a simple "if" statement can be used when rendering a menu to decide whether to use the default background colour (black/white) or the highlight colour (red) when drawing a string of text on the screen.
When the menu bar needs to be moved, the string of text that is highlighted is simply drawn again, this time using the default background colour.

The characters were redrawn and deliberately centred vertically inside each 5x8 grid (as best could be achieved) so that when drawn using a different background colour, they did not appear off-centre.

Here's a screenshot of the output acheived using these fonts:

Things are moving pretty quickly at Nerd Towers, with our Score Sure Golf Pro gaming device finally making it off the screen and onto the hardware!
Here's a picture of the device in development:



It's not entirely complete: there's something funny going on with the display. When a few characters are displayed, the contrast is nice and sharp and each pixel stands out clearly. As more pixels are lit up, the contrast gets dimmer and dimmer. To the point where if you try to display a bitmap image, the screen appears blank - and only by waving it about do you realise that the image is there, it's just that the contrast is so low, the pixels don't appear to be lit up.
Even during "normal" operation, where rows of text are sent to the screen, pale stripes appear everywhere, where the contrast for an entire column is lower than other parts of the screen.

Perhaps it's because it's one of these low voltage 3v ones.
Maybe there's a reason why most LCDs run off 5v.....

RS are good.
Seriously. Their customer service is excellent. I ordered a new display on a whim last night at about 4.30pm. By 10am this morning, DHL were knocking on the door with a parcel. There were no silly delivery charges or anything like that - £9+VAT and the next day, you've got yourself a GLCD display!

This one has just 18-pins, and a load of onboard capacitors, resistors and stuff, so although there are cheaper displays available, they all seem to need a load of capacitors, external negative voltage and so on. This one - according to the datasheet - is nice and easy to interface with.

It's all theoretical at the minute as I've spent most of today trying to get the display connected up to my breadboard. The pads on the left-hand side are arranged in two rows of nine, rather than a nice, easy, single row of 18 pins.
I've added some header pins and the spacing is perfect for attaching a ribbon cable, just like the ones you find on the back of a floppy disk drive, or an old hard drive.
The ribbon cable fits snugly and after testing for continuity between each pin and the end of the cable, it seems that all my dry joints have been fixed and we're ready to go!



Except once again my soldering skills have let me down. I'm really struggling getting the other end of the ribbon cable onto any kind of connector that I can use with my breadboard. So in theory, my lovely new GLCD display is perfect for my ScoreSure Golf Pro device, but in practice, I've no idea!

Latest update on the Game Scoring Device now know as ScoreSure.

After making the decision to create a device for each individual game, here's the latest progress on SureScore Golf Pro:

After spending ages looking for cheap GLCD displays for the device and having spent days trying (and failing) to get the 122x32 displays to work, they were abandoned. They need negative voltages just to get something to appear on the screen and are very fiddly to solder. In the end, although they are cheap, they're just too much hassle to bother with.
Having made this decision, the next big decision was to swallow the extra cost and go for a 128x64 GLCD display. These are pretty common but prices are around £10 each for a ready-to-use easy-to-solder version. At least coding could resume, and the best thing is that the 128x64 GLCD display can be simulated using Oshonsoft PIC18 simulator.
Awesome.

Here are some screenshots of the latest development:



Select the game type (Match Play, Stableford etc.) Golfers know what this is all about - different game types use different rules to decide who has won! Some favour better players (lower handicaps) whereas others - such as Stableford - favour less consistent players and are more forgiving of having a few bad holes in a round. Or so I'm told!
The device supports the following tournament types:

• Match Play
• Stroke Play
• Par Play
• Stableford Rules

The device allows for the following player combinations:

• Single/solo play
• Head-to-head (two players)
• Three individuals
• Foursome (2 x teams of partners)
• Fourball

ScoreSure Golf Pro (as it is now called) allows you to download course details from the internet - this includes information for each hole yardage and the par for the hole. This screen shows which course has been selected and the user can decide to play 9 or a full 18 hole round.



Player details can be downloaded from your PC onto the ScoreSure Golf Pro or entered on-the-fly. Press the up/down arrows to select a pre-loaded players details, or press the edit button to enter their name, handicap and the type of tees that they play off manually.



The course details for each hole are displayed, showing the distance to the flag from each of the tee-off positions and the par for the hole depending on the type of tees you are playing from. If you are playing off red tees, for example, the par for this hole may be different to someone who is playing the same hole but off white tees.



At each hole the user can press the "edit" button to review or enter scores for the hole. This allows the user to scroll through previous holes played and view the score sheet for each hole if required.
ScoreSure Golf Pro automatically calculates how many shots each player is awarded for each hole, based on their handicap, the type of tees they are playing off (which determines the stroke index for the hole) and the game type (for example, Four-ball play usually reduces each players handicap to 3/4).



In edit mode, the user highlights the statistic values that they wish to edit and uses the up/down buttons to increase/decrease the score.
As a score is entered for each hole, ScoreSure Golf Pro calculates the nett score for the hole for each player and updates the electronic score card accordingly. For each player, at each hole, you can record "up/down" and "sand-saver" results. After saving the hole results, the device moves on to the next hole, displaying the distance, par details etc.

Still to do
A summary screen, available at any time, showing the points for each player and who is winning the round. Also, a scrollable version of a digital score card, so that each player's progress at each hole can be seen quickly and easily. For detailed analysis of each hole, simply move the arrow to alongside the hole you wish to view (in the same way the arrow alongside each player is moved to select a player) and press a button to see the "hole results" screen.

Obviously the whole upload/download thing needs coding (although a lot of this has already been done in the early game score device prototype). And a complete website for hosting the results needs building too. But as far as the actual scoring device goes, it's probably about 2/3 of the way there.....

After feeling really pleased with myself for finally getting somewhere near finished on a project that only came to life a few weeks ago, I've been showing it off to a few people to get some feedback. A few people at Brighton and Hove Petanque club showed some interest, and each had their own suggestions for improving it (for example, a built-in digital measuring device). The general impression was "it's a pretty good idea, but if you could build this into it, it would be brilliant."

I took the same device to the Whitefields Golf Course for some advice from real golfers. My original idea had slowly begun to morph into a "game scoring device with some extra bits for keeping golf scores". The response was similar to the last - "yes, very nice, but if you could make it do x,y and z, then it would be awesome".

So my general feeling is that a single game scoring device may end up being just a little bit too generic - a bit of everything for everyone. So I've decided to concentrate on specific games and build a scoring device that is specifically tailored to each. After all, the bulk of the code can be re-used between projects (selecting and storing player names and interfacing with an LCD/GLCD display for example). I just feel that in trying to be clever and create a device that does everything, I'm in danger of ending up with something that isn't really much use to anyone!

Never satisfied until the best. Or something like that. When you've grown up with a die-hard blue-nosed Everton fan, stuff like that tends to stick in your head and pop out at the most inappropriate moments. Perhaps today it's not quite so inappropriate.

After all, the ScoreStore Game Keeping Device (see, it has a name now, thanks to Robot Steve over at BotBuilder.co.uk) is done, finished, working, tested, working, done, finished. But somehow, I feel it's not quite there...

For a start, the LCD display is big and clumsy. Secondly, it needs more than 2xAAA batteries to power it. Thinking about the enclosure - which has yet to be designed - this is going to make the device quite a big heavy thing to carry around in your pocket! A big display I can live with, but having to pump 4 x AAA batteries into something like this seems a bit overkill - a portable CD player or a torch, maybe, but an LCD display with a couple of buttons?
My game score keeping device will end up the size of a C90 cassette tape! It'd be easier to carry an A5 notebook in your pocket - there has to be some way of making the whole thing smaller, lighter, and altogether more "professional" looking.

As it turns out, this little thing appeared on eBay. It's a GLCD (graphical LCD). Look at it - it's tiny. No thicker than an After Eight mint. And, best of all, it runs at 3v (as low as 2.5v, so it still works even after a bit of battery drain!). Brilliant.


Low profile, low voltage, and 4 times bigger than a 16x2 character display.
What's not to love about this GLCD?

Luckily the Oshonsoft PIC18 simulator/compiler supports graphical LCD displays - so the commands currently used for writing data out to the 16x2 LCD can be quickly and easily upgraded to use the GLCD. And, to put the cherry on the cake, we can have some nice icons and monochrome bitmaps, just to show off how clever it all is!

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.

Before any others are anywhere near complete, it's time to add yet another project to the Nerd Club Blog. It's actually part of the Game Score Device but because there's a lot going on with it, a separate project was created for this LCD Keychain Photo Album Hack.

In time, it would be nice to be able to miniaturise the game score device so that it fits into a keychain-type enclosure - or at least to make use of the cool little full-colour LCDs that they use, instead of the clunking great 2-line character display. Since they both cost about the same (between £3-£4 each) it would make sense to use the keychain idea, as for the same money you also get an enclosure and some micro-buttons ready to use!

The keychain also comes with a 3.7v lithium-ion battery and a miniature USB socket, so there's plenty to be salvaged, although I suspect that re-using the battery is going to be difficult, so I'll be looking to replace this with a watch battery or two.

Any way, there it is - a new project: how to hack a keychain LCD photo album.
After all, if it works, there are probably 101 uses for it, not just a game scoring device!

Sunday saw the first Brighton and Hove Petanque Newcomers Doubles contest. In all, twenty-one people turned up to play: new players and old hands mixed up to form doubles teams with one of each player in each team (except for one "trebles" team made up with the extra player!).

It was an excellent day and everyone enjoyed both the social and competitive aspect of the games. Each team played a total of six games, and prizes were awarded to the top three teams on the day. Team Nerd managed to scrape in sixth - a row of losses, one after the other, broken by a single solitary win towards the end of the day was just enough to avoid taking home the wooden spoon!

It was also an ideal opportunity to try out my game scoring device. Unfortunately, it was still only at the breadboard stage so I couldn't demonstrate it, although it certainly generated some interest.
A website for recording and displaying game results is already under way and the idea is to eventually link the two - so after playing your game (petanque, darts, snooker, whatever) and recording the results on the device, they can be uploaded to a website where they are automatically assembled into a league table and the winner(s) displayed for everyone to see.

More details will be posted here as they become available.

It was only a few days ago that this prototype was a whimsical idea and now it's sat on my desk, all lit up and working. It's taken a few micros to get here (see previous posts about how plugging a chip in the wrong way round is not a good idea!) but my new Game Score Keeping Device is almost ready to put into a housing and try out for real!

The LCD display includes a backlight
but this photo shows that the contrast
needs some adjustment!

This early prototype uses a 16F628A chip, not one of the bigger, beefier 18F series. In fact, the functionality and data storage have had to be simplified to get everything to fit into the massive 2k program memory space! Now when a game starts, you simply move the cursor over the two existing team names to change them. In the 18F series, a database of existing team names can be used to select a name instead of having to type one in every time.

Although ideal for prototyping, the 2k program limit in the 16F is already causing a few problems (functionality has had to be reduced to get the code to compile!). The final version will definitely use the 18F series chip for a couple of reasons:

First, you get an enormous 24k of program memory. Seriously, that's a lot of programming space. Plus connection to the PC can be made using onboard USB instead of serial (the 16F has a built in USART but no USB). And you get more eeprom memory space. And - most importantly of all - the 18F series is also available as 18LF which means is supports lower voltage operation (2.5V) so the whole thing will be able to run off just two AAA batteries, instead of the four it takes now.