Giga Arcade? Mega Arcade?
As the class majority agreed that we will proceed with video games as the theme for the final machine, I began to spun my brain to see if there’s some interesting thing that we can bring to the table. A thought crossed my mind to create a giant “wayback machine” which is just a big arcade machine compiling multiple “retro” games, taking things a step further beyond what Intro to IM can offer. I imagine there would be dozens of button that control individual or interconnected modules inside the machine. Would it end up as a control panel instead? Perhaps. But if we cover it up enough, people will only notice it as arcade machine.
Inspiration Deck
I would like to build a Flappy Bird video game. I use Notion for the inspiration mood board / deck. Feel free to check it out in the link provided here.
Inspecting Machinery
In the short time I had interacting with the carnival machine from two years ago, there are a few insights that I gathered, some which give me a “picture” on how I might implement mechanisms for the Flappy Bird.
- The movements provided by the motors are very limited, and while it may be “limiting,” nothing stops imagination from creating unique visuals.
- Some movement may look simple, but in reality, connecting the individual modules into a single coherent machine may be more work than said.
- It is imperative that we build the machine like building blocks, I suppose this is to easily debug things as it grows larger.
- The waves for the ship uses Rack and Pinion, I wonder if implementing it vertically is possible?
Feb 5: Dibs on Flappy Bird
The way I think about it is inspired by conveyor belt sushi and puppets! Not sure how “easy” it would be, but I envision having two mechanisms (at least): a) for the bird’s vertical movement, I would be using Rack and Pinion, and b) for the pipes horizontal movement I would be using Conveyor Belt.
For the bird, plugging it (printed paper) into a cardboard seems a pretty solid idea and then just nailing it (or glue if it withstands). I’ve skimmed through some of the conveyor belt tutorials and they seem to be using IR sensors to detect objects like how real-life conveyor belt works, but for this project’s module I do not see why I should use it when I only need to stick a cardboard pipe and just roll it around.
This means that I need to install two conveyor belts for top and bottom. Part of the problem of using conveyor belt is that I have to set it up vertically so the motion looks like the pipes from the game. But, ecause I am setting it up that way, I can have the pipes look bobbing up and down by taking advantage that the conveyor belt will have a upper-lower part to it.
Another approach that I can think of is to use springs (as I observed some projects took advantage of this) to bob the pipe up and down with various timings. But while this may sound easier, there would not be a horizontal movement for the pipes and I have to adjust the timings for each individual mechanism.
Envisioning Machine Works
Regarding the machine interaction, I’m not entirely sure which one is the best course of action. For instance, assuming the user presses a button that starts the game, if I am prioritizing longevity, I might program the entire game play course so that it plays for a certain amount of time until the bird intentionally crashes. Or take the hard route and allowing the players to control the bird, program game start and overs, and potentially running into human bugs and errors.