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By RichardS
#43165 User
glazlink

Description
WiFiBoy project is originally kicked off for my 13-year-old son, Ricky. He told me he'd like to learn how to make games. So we decided to build our own game dev kit and try to build some wifi game engines to simply game development on IOT.

The kit hardwares are all quite simple. Four wires connect to a SPI-TFT LCD with ESP-8266 module. We use NodeMCU design to add an USB-UART and Auto-Program feature with NodeMCU flasher. And an Ext PCB as WiFiBoy joypad. Only one single ADC to wire four tact switches from Omron. And a buzzer is wired to GPIO4 for PWM sound.

The Game SDK is nore fully implemented well at this time. But we will release a beta at Github soon.

The WiFiBoy game engine is based on ESP8266 SDK written in C codes. We use serveral software timers to control game states, graphic rendering and sound rendering.

The sound rendering engine is currently specially designed for Buzzers. The background music is two polyphony sound and one sound effect channel for foreground sound.

The ghraphic rendering engine is a "dirty rectangle" optimized design. Only modified area will be rendered via SPI to TFT LCD. The performance is quite good to make simple sprite-based games.

Parts
- Glazlink Module: Actually a NodeMCU + a 2.2" SPi-TFT LCD (ILI9341/9328)
- WifiBoy Ext Board: Four buutons + 2 buzzers

Links


Video


Images
Attachments
wifiboy4.jpg
wifiboy3.jpg
wifiboy2.jpg
wifiboy1.jpg
User avatar
By woodat
#43282 Hooray games! If it helps, someone actually came up with a clever way of doing an analogue joystick with just the adc and a couple of the gpios. In case you're curious

https://hackaday.io/project/8435-2-anal ... ultiplexer
User avatar
By glazlink
#43309 Thanks, woodat!

I did have tried two-analog joystick for simple games and finally put four standard Omron B3F-4000 buttons for better game controls. (Actually I'm working on some 4-button-game demos at this time. Most of them have much of fun!)