Laser Tank Siege School Project

this is my second attempt with project if than that. this time i made a game where you used a laser tank to destroy somebodies castle and kill their king.

Step 1: First Itteration

My first iteration of the project if then that was rather poor as it was
essentially just a sensor that could detect whether the water level got too low.

Step 2: Second Itteration

The teachers told me that the project should include something that you
couldn't do with normal electronics. So in essence data should flow from the censors to the program and data should flow from the program to the circuit. In this case there wasn't a traditional censor instead the user would have to look if the servo is lined up with its target and feed that information back into the program. This is also the iteration where I came up with the idea for a sort of board game using tanks. which ended up with me making a war game of sorts using these tanks.

The biggest things I learned were:
how to operate a 3d printer how to make a circuit that doesn't burn down how to solder a circuit together and how to send date from processing into the Arduino program. As I had never done these things before. I had the biggest trouble with the 3D printer as when I measured the pieces that would have to fit inside I didn't count on the plastic shrinking over time and I have to file down and reprint a lot of the pieces because of it. I am also disappointed with how the Arduino and processing programs turned out, as I was only able to send a single char from processing over to the Arduino, which made me have to write some spaghetti code in order to bypass that limitation.either way the knowledge i have learned about electronics have been valuable to me as a designer as they give me ideas for new ways to implement game play mechanics using these principles.

Step 3: Third Itteration

in the feedback that my teacher gave me was noted that my project was to complex and unclear. as such i have done two things to improve my project, first i switched out the toothpick i was using for targeting. before it was very unclear if you were actually on target when aiming and mostly relied on the user eyeballing it by looking through a poorly constructed sight.now with the laser it is a lot more clear when the users has scored a hit on a target. the second thing i did was to make a simpler game for my project as the previous one required to many manual actions and was hard to understand. the new game i came up with only requires the user to aim and fire. i have also written down a complete set of rules for how to play this game which i will show off further down the line.