March 13, 2025

Today was again a very Bop It! focused day. Some folks and I went on a field trip to MicroCenter in Brooklyn to check out what they had. I picked up some hardware goodies, including a replacement joystick and LCD screen, as well as a fun pimoroni screen that I don’t have plans for yet but might inspire something in the future. I also picked up some replacement 3d printer filament since we’ve been doing a lot of 3d printing this week at RC!

On the Bop It project, I made some progress, namely:

• Hooked up a Piezo buzzer. I had really been struggling with the speaker set up that I was trying to make work. I had a small 1 ohm speaker (along with a PAM 8403 amp) that I was hoping would be able to play wav files but I didn’t really do enough research ahead of time before settling on that as “my plan” and was sort of disappointed when it didn’t work exactly the way I expected. IIRC, there was some combination of the Pico not quite having enough power out of the box to stream the wav files and the speaker not having the fidelity it needed to play the sounds. I decided I could use that speaker to play some buzzes / beeps instead to indicate different move types and to give feedback to the user if they made the wrong move. Then, I realized I could use a Piezo buzzer for the same effect and could maybe get away with not having to use an amp for the buzzer, which simplified the design a bit. I hooked that up and got it working on the breadboard.
• Then, I attempted to start building out the PCB board to make the game a bit more permanent. This required soldering which I haven’t (really) done before. I was able to get the Pi Pico and the accelerometer attached to the board somewhat easily, and then I started wiring up the header pins for various components. This had mixed results. I was able to confirm that the touch sensor and accelerometer were hooked up correctly and collecting data, but had some problems with the LCD display (not receiving power) and the slider (it seems to think it’s connected, but isn’t registering a change in resistance when sliding the potentiometer). By that time it was pretty late, I had inhaled a lot of solder fumes (😬) and I was getting tired. I decided to pick the soldering back up next week, and will probably need to ask for help to figure out how to both debug the connection and also maybe clean up some of the bad soldering. A bit frustrating, but still somewhat encouraging that some of the sensors work!