March 12, 2025

Today, I’m making some good progress on Bop It. Some of the things that I’ve done:

• Designed a box for the game, with holes for the various sensors. This was kind of scary, but I think maybe it worked? I used Tinkercad to do the design and am looking forward to 3d printing it so I can try it out. The initial design is very simple, and all the sensors will be on the front of the box. The box is also pretty big but this will give me a sense of how all these pieces fit in the space, etc.
• Figured out how to get the game working with battery power! This was easier than I expected. The RPi Pico runs whatever is in main.py on boot, so getting the battery working was basically as easy as making sure the latest files were uploaded and then plug in the battery! The battery has an easy connector, too, so I think that will be my mechanism for turning the game “on” in this first prototype. I did find that the game didn’t boot automatically when powering the device with the computer – it turns out the MircoPico VS code extension interrupts the boot with the REPL, so to get the code to run automatically, I just need to turn off VS code (or disconnect MicroPico from the device).
• Up next I need to figure out how the speaker works and figure out what devices I need for the final wiring and which devices I need to replace!