Antimentia-A Fun Arcade Retro Style Memory Game

Antimnetia is a memory arcade game that shows a sequence of lighting LEDs. After that, the LEDs goes off, and the player has to repeat the correct sequence accordingly by pressing the corresponding buttons placed next to each LEDs. If the player gets all the sequence correct, the game levels up, and it tests one's memory even harder thereafter. On failing to repeat the correct sequence, the player has to restart the same level they were stuck on. For example, if a player makes a mistake in level 5, they will get a new sequence of level 5 to try again. Despite having the latest smartphones with similar games in the form of application nowadays, many of us are still keen on nostalgic retro devices. Antimentia will surely give you a feeling of retro arcade gaming and, at the same time, benefit your mental health. Also playing this memory game will keep one's mind active and might help to prevent or at least delay the onset of memory loss with age, the decline of thinking skills, Dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. We bet now you know the meaning behind the name of the project (hint: It is 'Anti+Dementia').

1. Arduino (pick your fav one) here we will be using the standalone version to make it more compact
2. LEDs x 7
3. PushButtons x 5
4. Power Source
5. Bunch of wires
6. Arduino IDE

Being electronics enthusiasts, we thought of building a fun project from scratch by using laying around components that can keep people engaged as well as help children, adults or elders who have a forgetful memory.

Antimnetia was built with a microcontroller, five LEDs, five pushbuttons, and a bit of code. The microcontroller was so programmed, at first, it will show a random sequence of glowing LEDs. To do that, it required a random number generator with random seeding, which was done by reading a value from a floating analog pin of the microcontroller. Since the pin is floating, the voltage at any instant is unpredictable, thus making the distribution of numbers more random. The total five pushbuttons are now interfaced with the microcontroller accordingly. Now this part, i.e. reading the correct pushbutton input, required some debouncing and state change detection, which we did by writing some more code. Upon doing that and comparing the button pressed with the expected button which was needed to be pressed for winning the level(which was stored in the random array), it decides the result whether it's a win or a loss. We added two more LEDs, one green and a red, which flashes after winning or losing. Well, obviously, the green for winning and the red for losing.

Above given the schematics if you want to recreate the project, and a reference PCB Design.

Link To GitHub for Code here.

Try out the Game in TinkerCad from here.

The first challenge was to prepare the setup for burning the program inside the microcontroller. It does not have a handy connection like Arduino. Due to a faulty rail in the breadboard, the microcontroller was not running, which was expected. Now then comes generating fairly distributed random numbers that don't repeat by themselves after a period, and also, when you start the microcontroller, it doesn't start with the same value. In spite of using random() from the C library, it was giving some predictable results, so we need to seed the random() periodically to get a fairly random sequence. Now talking about the input from the pushbutton was not that easy, though. It requires a lot of cleaning and tuning before you can process a push from a pushbutton. Debouncing and state detection was the process to clean them. Last but not least, it was difficult to debug the results from the microcontrollers since we didn't have an ISP debugger, and we were using an Arduino instead so, whenever something was going wrong, we had to change codes and make the Arduino once a debugger and a programmer, which was a tedious part.

Creating a 3D printed casing and fabricating the PCB design for commercializing this project as a toy product. Further up-gradation will contain an LCD screen that will display the High scores and current Level. Adding the sound feature that gives an authentic retro feeling with the addition of external EEPROM to store higher resolution of music notes for better sound.

Kudos to Deblina Chattopadhyay for creating this project with me <3