M1n1_g4m3s

Hello!

This is a simple Arduino nano mini games project inspired by the Late 20th Century arcade games. Pong (Atari, 1972) and Space Invaders (Taito, 1978). I also wanted to imitate the Game Boy (Nintendo, 1989) for its self contained, hand held properties for portability and cost.

Electronics:

1. Arduino nano
2. I2C OLED display
3. 5 push buttons
4. A switch
5. Lipo
6. 2 leds (green and red)
7. 2 resistors
8. TP4056 charging board
9. Prefboard
10. Jumper wires

Tools:

1. Soldering Iron
2. Solder
3. Breadboard for prototyping and testing

The Games:

1. Pong, Atari 1972
2. Space Invaders, Taito 1978

The System:

1. Game Boy, Nintendo 1989

First I wired together the buttons Arduino and display on a breadboard to which allowed me to play around with the push buttons layout.

I drew up a diagram in cirkitdesigner as well for reference as shown above.

Pinout:

Once the initial hardware set up on the breadboard is functional I then loaded up the first draft pong I built just to test the software as well as see how it feels playing on it.

I then further adjusted the buttons layout until it felt comfortable to play.

Once I was happy with the functionality of it all on the breadboard, then next step was to move it over to a more permanent board, so I started to layout all the components onto the prefboard.

Then soldered down all the pins of the components down then using solid core wire I started to connect up all the components based on the above pin out.

Once that was all done I connected the Arduino to my computer to power it just to test that it all works as intended.

Once all the main functionality is down, the next step is powering it all. One of the aims of this project was to make it all self contained and portable so it was important that the power system was all attached to the main board.

When powering Arduinos via the pins there are 2 main options:

1. VIN (voltage input) requires 7 to 12 volts
2. 5V - must not exceeded 5.5V or bye bye Arduino.... because it bypasses the onboard voltage regulator

Our lipo only provides ~3.7V so VIN is not an option unless I bring in a voltage booster like the MT3608 but I don't want the final system to be very bulky so I just connected it to the 5V pin as the lipo wont go over 5.5V.

More info on powering Arduinos

To handle charging the battery I'm using the TP4056 which cuts off automatically when full, don't charge it when its running.

Hardware:

Cut off extra perfboard.

Software:

I then updated the interface to fit more with the theme, and added both games to the menu system.

Due to the lack of memory on the nano, making lots of games will be quite difficult so they would have to be quite stripped down.

The file attached is the final program which provides a splash screen, menu system, pong and Space Invaders.