Accessible Pong Game (AccessiPong)

Fun fact, the original pong game had zero lines of code and relied completely on hardware circuitry, which I did not know before starting this project. Not so fun fact, it wasn't very accessible to handicapped users due to the fact that it required rotary potentiometers which require fine movements to operate. The solution? Come up with a project to benefit Boston College's Campus School students who suffer from mental and physical disabilities.

Making pong was one of my earlier coding projects, I still remember the Giraffe Academy video I watched in high school to learn how to make it. I'd known how to code for a couple of years by then, but I wanted to do something that I could share with my friends because I'd noticed that I hadn't ever used my coding ability to do so. Once it was finished, I brought my laptop to the next Minecraft night and we had a fun warm-up Pong session before the main event (Minecraft) started.

Therefore, with this project I wanted to share the fun that my friends and I had playing Pong at Minecraft night with the Campus School in a way that is accessible to the greatest number of students.

Adafruit

1. 64x32 LED Matrix
2. Matrixportal M4
3. USB-C Data Cable
4. PCA9546A 4 Channel I2C Multiplexer
5. 2 VL53L1X ToF Distance Sensors
6. 3 JST SH 4-Pin Cables

Boston College Makerspace

1. Laser Cutter
2. Hot Glue
3. 1/8 Baltic Birch

Make absolutely sure that the small orange piece of tape covering the sensor on the VL53L1X ToF distance sensors is removed before the project, as with the tape on your readings will be inaccurate.

Plug the Matrixportal into the HUB75-D slot, and connect one I2C cable into the I2C port. With the other end of the cable, plug into the PCA9546A in the side port. Next, take one VL53L1X and connect it to port 0 and another on port 3.

Lastly, be sure that the power cable included with the LED matrix is connected to the matrixportal with the red cable connecting to 5V and black to GND.

My boxes are attached, one is for the LED matrix and the other two are for the time of flight sensors. Boxout is the file for the matrix. Boxout 3 has both for the time of flight sensors.

With CircuitPython on your board and the adafruit-circuitpython-bundle downloaded, copy the attached code to your code.py file. In the code you will not only find an easter egg containing my favorite and least favorite baseball teams, but there will also be code for setting up the display, interacting with the multiplexer and connected time of flight sensors, ball and paddle sizes, ball and paddle movement, also containing score displays and a win screen.

As for a note regarding the sizes of the ball, text, and speed of the game. I decided to make the ball larger and game slower than usual to make it more accesible to the students at the Campus School. The same goes for the text being large as it makes the score easier to read.

I hope you found the easter egg and enjoyed this build. Compared to Minecraft or NBA 2K it's a pretty tame game, but there's a reason it's timeless. There's a PS5 in the common room that my roomate and I share, we can play any game we want; games that require gigabytes of storage and millions of lines of code. However, with some cheap parts, 200 lines of code, and 187 kilobytes of storage, we had just as much fun. We were both genuinely excited when I got this project to work and spent the night playing AccessiPong with some music on. I hope the Campus School students love it.