For my Individual Discovery Project for ECE 1100, I decided I wanted to create a fun project out of parts that I had in my Arduino kit from a high school engineering class. I was most interested in trying to program the 16 x 2 LCD in the kit because it would allow me to display some form of graphics which meant that I could make a game! I chose to follow a tutorial because I have little experience in game design, and I still learned plenty while following the tutorial since I had to understand what the program was even doing to add more functionality to an existing game. My original goal was to add more features and functionality to the basic 2d platforming game. This would have involved adding a level difficulty select before the game began or a background song that played as the game was being played. I focused on the background song because I thought that the original Super Mario Bros. Theme Song would have been a perfect fit. However, I soon realized the complexity of playing a song with an Arduino through a buzzer (really a piezoelectric speaker). To program all the notes in a song, you must keep track of all the frequencies/tones being played and how long each note is held. I found an online program that could convert a .midi file into Arduino code that allowed a song to be played with a buzzer. I ran into another issue from this, though. I know that the Arduino is a single-core processor, so it would be difficult to write a program that plays music as the LCD is being constantly updated to scroll and move the player’s character up and down. It’s possible through protothreading as covered in this tutorial https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/reanimationxp/how-to-multithread-an-arduino-protothreading-tutorial-dd2c37, but it relies on monitoring many different small tasks that can be accomplished in a relatively short amount of time. I could’ve broken this down into different functions like playing one note and checking when the buzzer needed to be changed to play the next note, scrolling the screen by one grid space, checking the user’s button press, and if the player’s character collided with an obstacle. I would’ve had to invest all my time into learning how to multithread between all these small tasks to keep the song being played in the background and update the LCD to be constantly scrolled and move the player’s character up and down depending on if the button was pressed. Instead of adding a full song into the game, I decided to just add sound effects for starting the game and every time the player jumps (the sound is not played when the button is pressed and the player cannot jump). This added audio feedback makes the game a little more enjoyable and would help if the person playing the game intended to go for a high score. Another feature that I thought I could add if given more time would be to save the highest score on the Arduino itself using the microcontroller’s EEPROM to store the score even when the microcontroller doesn’t have any power supplied to it.

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Tutorial for LCD game taken from here: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/muhamd-magdy/arduino-game-by-lcd-9a3bc2