The lose and win

It's the picture when you lose this game.It's the pictrue when you win this game.

It's the pictrue when you win this game.

The interface of game

The introduction of this game

The finish design of stage

The rabbite is the crane

and the love shape might be  the button of going back

Electronics – The Walkthrough

The Toy

The toy is a fishing rod game and it was my job to combine this with a small printed circuit from a keyboard. The following is the process I underwent and I was proud to achieve a working final product.

So, what was inside?

Fist thing was first, I had to have a look at what was inside and see what I could do with what was there. I opened the toy up to find:

The Modifying

Ideally, I would like to be able to fit everything needed into the space that I already had. I simply didn’t like the idea of having to have an external compartment somewhere on the toy to store the keyboard’s circuit and wiring. So I stripped out the LCD screen, it’s circuit and the wiring. This surprisingly didn’t leave as much room as I thought so I had to make even more.

This is the back plate of the screen part of the toy. I drilled and cut out the battery compartment (as seen in the first image) as it wasn’t going to be needed anymore. The new toy will be USB powered and leaving the battery compartment would have just been a waste of valuable space.

While I had the drill out, I drilled a hole at the bottom of the handle so that the USB wire would be able to run out it.

Seeing as the screen was no longer being used to display anything, I covered it in black tape just to clean it up and so it would look neater from the outside. The LCD screen itself is only about 1cm thick so I decided to leave it as it would look better than anything I could replicate.

The Initial Wiring

Now to the hard part.

The keyboard’s circuit has two sets of pins. There are 12 pins on either side and a combination of at least one from either side *may* result in a character output from the keyboard. We checked this by touching pins from either sid with the same piece of wire. This completed the circuit.

Here’s a list that we made that shows what pins corrisond with a letter or number.

( Thanks to Lillian for the lovely hand modeling )

We chose only to do letters and numbers because we didn’t want to run into any problems later when it came to programming it later.

I glued the keyboard ciruit into the LCD compartment. This would make the circuit more secure and less prone to moving as I worked on it.

I had to double check these combinations again just to make sure. After I did this I began temporarily holding down the wires with some tape. This allowed me to get a better understanding of how many wires were needed and just how small and fidly it all is.

Now to hold down these wires. There was a little aluminium stip that came with the keyboard that I could use to hold down the wires with. I covered it in tape to insulated it as to not interfere with all the other wires.

However, when I went to screw the plate down, the center would tighten, but the edges rose and no longer held down the wires. It bent so I needed something tougher…….My solution? A Spoon of course!

As strage as it sounds, it worked! Of course, I cut the actual spoon part off and used the handle part. Again, I taped it so it wouldn’t interfere with the other wires but it did the job. I then tried to glue the wires in place as best as I could just to secure them.

Finishing The Wiring

So, I needed to connect the jystick that was already there to the keyboard somehow. I used 4 micro switches which would be pushed when the joystick moved up, down, left or right respectively.

I judged where the micro switches should go by placing them where the old switched used to be underneath the joystick. I covered the ciruit with tape to insulate and I could still see where the switches should go.

And the micro switches all wired up.

I also had to connect up the 2 switches that we were going to use from the bottom half of the toy. We were going to use the reel and theline switch. This wasn’t too hard to do theoretically but the wire kept breaking so it took a fair few tries just to get it the way I wanted.

Finishing Up

Just a last few things to do and that’s it!

I then ran the USB wire out the bottom put the other half on the main body of the fishing Rod.

Here’s a shot of some of the wiring I had to endure.

I closed over the LCD compartment careful not to damage the wiring and slid this onto the Main Body of the Fishing Rod.

I then tested it one final time just to make sure it worked and thankfully it did.

It’s safe to say that I spent over 20 hours on this project, although it may come across differently in this post. The wires never worked first time so it was a matter of constantly tweaking it until it worked. I’m just thankful that this ordeal is over me

Thanks,

Sean Smyth

Electronics are done!

Just to say that the electronics are complete and now it’s just a matter of painting and decorating and the hardware is finished for good!

I (Sean) will post a walkthrough on what I did but it’s taking a little longer to compile than I thought. Bare with me.

Illustrations are done now too so Programming is the main objective now.

Objective: Present!

We had to formally present our Aims, Ideas and concepts to a board of lecturers and indeed the rest of the class last Thursday.

Our pitch went down well, with the Lecturers especially liking Lillian’s art style when it came to the crane concept. (Shown below)

The Keyboard was also given out today so it’s up to Seán to dismantle both it and the toy and to get them working in unison with a Computer. Fingers crossed!

Photo Shoot!

Here are Photos of out Fishing Rod toy that we have to combine with a keyboard to make a new and interesting Multimedia interface.

 

Fishing Rod Toy 1

Fishing Rod Toy 1

Fishing Rod Toy 1

 

Update – 7/3/09

This hasn’t been updated in a little while so here’s the scoop. We’ve decided on making a crane type game. We hope to use the gyroscope that’s already in the rod to control it but, if worst comes to worst, we have a backup plan.

The crane game is going to be either a truck loading game with its cargo going to be beer or a Student fishing for beer. Either way, it’s about good ‘aul beer.

Updated 23/3/09:

The game is now a crane game but not about beer. We’ve decided that it would be desirable if this toy appealed to young children and taking that into consideration, promotion of alcohol isn’t gonna work. So it’s a rabbit, who uses her ears to lift an item from one side of the stage to the other.

Tada!

The Unpacking

A simple video which simply shows the unpacking for the toy that will be the base for our project. It will be heavily modified by the end but what’s interesting about it is that it has a gyroscope in it so that will allow the detecting of movements. We’ll see how we take advantage of that in time.

Hello All!

Hello there and welcome to the collaborative blog brought to you by a group of students from Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland.

The Project challenges us to disassemble a children’s toy, a keyboard and combine the two to creative and interesting effect and this blog is a designated area for our whole team to document the progress made throughout the course project.

The Team consists of:

Seán Smyth
John Smith
Hugh Doyle
Lisa Rong
Lillian Wang

Keep an eye here for further updates and developments in the coming day.