Hungry Hungry Hippos Autoplay (2017)

Summary

Hungry Hungry Hippos Autoplay Posted: June 10, 2017 Introduction A group of my coworkers play board games during lunch time on Fridays and at one point invited me to play. Unfortunately all they play is a bunch of modern hipster games when I wanted to play Hungry Hungry Hippos. No one wanted to play with me so I decided to build circuitry that would take their place. Pushing the plastic lever eventually got really tiring so I decided to just make the game play by itself. The microprocessor of choice for this project is the W65C265SXB with the code written in 65C816 assembly. The image processing is done with a Sony Playstation 3 camera connected to a small Intel Atom based netbook with code written in C++. After getting the autoplay working I figured I'd do a quick extra credit project and made the hippos controllable through Amazon's Alexa (the Echo Dot). To connect the SXB to Alexa an ElectricImp was used. The source code below for the W65C265SXB board can be assembled with naken_asm. Related Projects @mikekohn.net Video VIDEO A video of the Hungry Hungry Hippos game auto-playing. The first part of the video shows the image processing on the netbook, the second part is just a single ball, and the last part is the hippos fighting over a few balls. There's a little delay from when a hippo swipes that it waits before trying again. https://youtu.be/YcaVS7d7cN4 VIDEO A video of Hungry Hungry Hippos controlled by Alexa through an ElectricImp. https://youtu.be/JB0nCFxV3PQ Pictures This is a closeup of the green Hungry Hungry Hippo with a servo motor. Here's the Hungry Hungry Hippos board along with all the electronics. Above the board is a Sony Playstation 3 USB camera attached to a microphone stand. To the far right is the W65C265SXB board. The breadboard next to it is simply there to provide 5v to all the motors. Explanation The hardest part of this project was getting the motors to pull the levers down. I tried a few different configurations of servo motors and DC mot...