I created my first website!

It’s not complicated but i like the theme very much. The hardest part by far was the CSS. Initially i wanted to make the project without any AI help to really learn but CSS broke me. Finding the correct colors and making the elements look nice was really hard. But overall i am happy with my first website!

I built FlappyINO a small form factor portable Flappy Bird Console. It is easy to take with you and enjoy on the go. It is based around the ATmega328P IC (the same IC that is used in the Arduino UNO and NANO) so the project is very easy to build from readily available parts. Also since the same IC is used in popular Arduino boards the project can be built on a breadboard and tested beforehand with ease.

This project was started before Stardance but before only the game part was there. Since Stardance the project became a lot more polished and i was able to add a lot of the features that were missing before. I rewrote the code to use the more user friendly VSCode + PlatformIO combo instead of the ArduinoIDE, before the code was organized in what ArduinoIDE calls “Tabs”. Now the code is organized in actual files and this is an actual software project. Apart from that in the v2 release i added: A game progression system with difficulty unlocks and more game modes, a Settings menu for graphical features, landing and takeoff animations, better UI and so much more. Please see the README to see the full list of changes and see the demo video for the gameplay.

As this is a hardware project and you can’t run something like Unity on a IC that has 2Kb of SRAM and 32Kb of flash you need to implement all of the “basic” things that you can do with a couple lines of code in game engine like collision detection, game loop, player inputs, accurate timings and stable FPS needs implementation by hand. This was by far the hardest part (together with game optimization and asset storage) that i had to overcome to finish this project.

I’m most proud of being able to combine all of these aspects into one and get something that is stable/reliable and responsive but also compact so that you can carry the whole console on your keychain. Don’t even get me started on the responsive part. Since the game needs to get faster and faster (otherwise it would get really boring) you will be quickly met with restrictions to how much data you can process and send to the display while keeping the game responsive and not slowing it down. Here even at 30 FPS you need to basically redraw 128x64=8.192 pixels every 33 ish milliseconds. On a modern computer that is not that hard but on a 8MHz microcontroller that is no easy feat. In the end i had to cut down and optimize almost all of the “redraws” to minimize the amount that needs to be actually “redrawn”.

To test the project select the hardware you want to run the project on (the PCB or an Arduino Board) go to the GitHub repository and follow the steps for the connections and code uploading. You can also watch the demo video beforehand to get more information about the project.

I really enjoyed being a part of the Stardance community and improving my project. I hope in the future i will be able to to more really interesting hardware and software projects. If you want to see this and my future projects grow please consider leaving feedback. I am designing these projects on my own so other peoples feedback is really important to me! Thank You! :)