March 20, 2025

Today I assembled the Bop It! Game! I put all the items in the box and tried it out! A few things I discovered:

• Super glue worked well for devices where I could get the surface flush with the box, specifically the touch sensor and the joystick. Interestingly, though, it seems like I got a little bit of glue on the joystick itself which seems to have messed with the joystick readings. The “default” or “empty” mode is now not very consistent, so I had to make some tweaks in the code to look for readings above or below a particular threshold instead.
• I had to use electrical tape to hold in the LCD display and the slider. This isn’t working great but “it’ll do” for now.
• The sliding box cover doesn’t have quite a deep enough groove so I needed to fortify it a little bit by putting some bumpers under the lid and some hot glue dots on the outside.
• The buzzer seems to be completely broken, and I’m not really sure why. My assumption is that it’s due to some bad connections of the pins. I want to get this working again but honestly I’m kind of tired of soldering so I decided to take a break.
• I am going to give a presentation about the game today! Slides are here.

I also wanted to get the pimoroni display pack set up to start playing with it a bit. This was slightly less straight forward than I expected at first because I had to flash the new device I got. And stupidly, I bought a Pico 2 W this time instead of a regular Pico, so the recommended firmware is a bit different. NBD, but I think going forward I should try to stick with one device type so I can have a consistent process. The device now has this release flashed onto the drive.

Following the tutorials on their product page were super useful!