Petting my Tentacool

Tentacool alive!

Our pinout for our Gameboys

Controller 1:
Up - Blue
Down - blue/white
Left - brown
Right - brown square/white
A - Green
B - Light brown twisted/white

Controller 2:
Up - Blue
Down - blue/white
Left - brown
Right - Light brown twisted/white
A - Orange twisted /white
B - White

Tentacool!!!! Ready to fight!

So we are starting to count down the days! 9 more to go! But we are on schedule . Earlier this week we completed our Gameboy Controller. You can see in the pictures the LCD screen lit up without a game console (right), and then 6 wires coming out from the back of the device (left). The wires were soldered onto the 4 directional buttons and the A and B buttons. All that is left here is connecting the firefly - deciding how to supply power to this firefly as well as integrate the wires into the Firefly's GPIOs.

Then we started to experiment with the newly arrived super bright LEDs. They are bright - don't look directly into them! We needed to find the optimal circuit design which would give sufficient voltage on each LED, while not exceeding the 20mA current rating. The picture on the left shows the proposed schematic of the 8 LEDs of Tentacool.

However, the entire purpose of these LEDs is to stimulate photoresistors, and with further experimentation we learned that the photoresistors are much more sensitive to red light. Although we wanted to use blue LEDs to maintain a sense of character (Tentacool is a water pokemon), we are close to concluding that we must use red LEDs as the weapons. Soldering for the robot is scheduled for Friday.

Finally, Alex will give an a more detailed summary of the software side, but we were able to program the robot. Now its all about integrating the firefly here too. Oh, and because of I/O limitations we are now using serial communication between the fireflys and robots.

Zuri

First day of true work on it

So today we finally started to do legit work on our project (finally). Thanks to Zuri's determination, he was able to find the necessary screwdrivers to open up the Gameboy Color. Those people at Nintendo really didn't want us to get into that...
Anyways, after we managed to open that baby up, we figured out that the buttons work by grounding: with a 3 V power sources, the button pins are usually at around 3V as well when they are not pressed. When they are pressed, they go down to around 4 mV. We hope that 4 mV is small enough in order for us to use GPIOs instead of ADC pins.
Additionally, we also finally got our computers to recognize our Polulu robot and we were thus able to program our first test program onto the bot with success.
Anyways, we should probably get back to work, so we'll leave ya'll faithful followers with a picture of our workbench and our materials.

Enjoy!