The Beginnings of Pong

Our game has made steady progress over the weekend. The first steps were soldering 128 LEDs onto the two monome boards. One row on each board is entirely made of red LEDs, so that the paddles will light up a different color than the ball, which will be blue. So far, we've managed to link ports A and B on the microcontroller in order to control all 16 rows of the combined board at once. We've decided to keep track of the location of both the balls and paddles in a 16x8 array. The paddles are controlled by Firefly sensors, whose x-out outputs are connected to ADC ports 0 and 1. The range in which the ADC converted values fall determines the location of the paddles. A real-time interrupt is implemented in order to constantly read the array and display the contents on the monome boards. The RTI uses a counter so that with each calling of the interrupt, a different row will be lit. This is necessary because the ports cannot supply enough power to light the entire board at once. Furthermore, we've managed to get the ball to bounce back and forth against one stationary paddle. The next step will be to integrate both paddles with the design and get the ball to move in a simple, mostly straight line back and forth between the paddles.