Pokemon Stadium

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