Marble Battle!
Siena Cizdziel, Yale College '23
This project is a competitive 2-player game where each player controls a paddle at the end of the machine to keep the opponent from scoring a marble into their goal. The controllers have two buttons, one for moving the paddle back and forth and the other to shake things up (!) in case the marble gets stuck on the board. When a goal is scored, the marble rolls to the end of the ramp and covers a photoresistor, which logs the score and sends it over to the display screen for your viewing. For this project, I wanted to create something fun and interactive for friends and visitors to play, so I decided to make a combination of an air hockey and pinball game. Enjoy!
The game would resemble a real-life Pong game and a pinball machine wrapped into one.
To enhance the game a bit, I wanted to add some additional features. In order to practice some of the skills we’ve learned in class over the semester, I decided to incorporate the Raspberry Pi 5-inch LED touchscreen display and wifi for score display, as well as sensors to determine scoring. At the time, I also had some other stretch goals, including a stepper motor-powered marble reset device and even using wet paint on the marbles to add an additional artistic element to the project.
| Bag of marbles | $3.50 (i actually got them on discount but they’re normally $7.50) |
|---|---|
| 5-inch LED display for RPi | from AKW |
| Provided materials from class (RPi, cords, ESP32, motors) | from Scott |
| Lots of CEID stuff, especially hot glue and popsicle sticks | 🤷♀️ |
For the enclosure, I used a pre-cut wood piece as the bottom of the game board and cut and glued cardboard around it to create the walls and side alleys. Because I did not have a ton of time and I wanted to make this project functional but as easily extendible as possible, the side alleys are slightly tilted to allow the marble to roll to one corner, and earlier on in the project I had actually glued paths for the marble to roll all the way down to the bottom (to then be taken back up with a stepper). I unfortunately never got around to implementing the stepper, so I took off those ramps. There is lots of space underneath the game board for the wiring.