Welcome to the Propeller Games! In a few installments, I’ll present several gaming projects that use the Parallax Propeller chip. The Propeller is perfect for gaming with its multiple CPU cores to handle simultaneous gaming activities and its on-board video generation circuitry.
My first game project is the classic “higher/lower” game, where the computer thinks of a number between 0 and 99 and you guess it. You have probably seen this played as the “Clock Game” on The Price is Right TV show, though some contestants struggle with a basic binary search algorithm. (You can watch videos of the game at YouTube.com.)
This entire project is built on a solderless breadboard. If you are new to the Propeller, this is the perfect project to get acquainted with the hardware and programming. If you are a Propeller guru, you will enjoy the nostalgia of gaming on LEDs and push buttons. Grab your breadboard and follow along.
Parts
What you’ll need:
- Breadboard and wire
- 9-VDC wall transformer
- Parallax PropStick USB
- Two-digit 7-segment LED display
- Five SPST pushbuttons
- Audio speaker
- Sixteen 200-Ω resistors
- Five 10-kΩ resistors
The board and basic parts
The Parallax Propeller chip requires a few external components. You need a 3.3-VDC power regulator, a crystal, and a USB-to-serial converter. You also need a serial EEPROM if you want the Propeller to run your program at power up. You can buy all these separately and wire them up on the breadboard. Or you can save time and space with the Parallax PropStick USB. It combines all these external parts on the same footprint as the 40-pin Propeller chip.
— ADVERTISMENT—
—Advertise Here—
I bought the LED display for this project from Mouser Electronics (part number 630-HDSP-521E). The large red segments are common anode (common ground). You supply positive voltage from a propeller port pin through a 220-Ω resistor to light the segments.
I bought the push buttons from Pololu Robotics & Electronics (part number 1400). They are specially designed for mounting on a breadboard. One side of each switch is connected to 3.3 V and the other is connected to a propeller port pin and pulled to ground with a 10-kΩ resistor.
I bought the speaker from Digi-Key (part number 668-1140-ND). The negative terminal of the speaker hooks to the breadboard’s ground. The positive terminal hooks directly to a Propeller port pin.
A speaker, one LED segment, and one switch wired to the Propeller
I placed four of the switches on the corners of the display. These switches are used as up/down inputs for each digit allowing the player to select a number from 00 to 99. The fifth button to the right of the display is the “Enter” button.
The photo above shows the speaker, one LED segment, and one switch wired to the Propeller. I tested the hardware and software incrementally as I hooked it up instead of trying to debug the final system as a whole.
The Parallax Propeller Tool is the free graphical Integrated Development Environment (IDE) you use to develop code for the Propeller. The code editor colors and highlights your work making it easy to see functions and keywords. It also manages indentation. The SPIN programming language uses indentation to identify code blocks much as Python does.
Basic hardware test
The code above is my basic hardware test. The CON (constants) section at the top configures the clock speed of the chip: 5 MHz × 16 = 80 MHz. The OBJ (object) section pulls in the serial terminal driver library. This library object allows you to use the USB cable for both programming and an input/output terminal. The one second pause on line 12 gives you time to switch from the IDE program to the terminal program on your PC once the code is downloaded. The Propeller tool download includes the parallax serial terminal for your PC.
Line 10 sets general I/O pin 0 (P0) as an output (they are inputs by default). Line 17 reads the switch connected to P11 and turns the LED segment on or off accordingly. Line 18 prints the state of the input pins to the PC terminal in an infinite loop.
Parallax serial terminal
It took me a while to warm up to the SPIN programming language. It is syntactically very different from C and its derivatives. But conceptually it is familiar: you break your software up into functions and local/global variables. In the end the simplicity of the syntax and the friendliness of the IDE won me over!
— ADVERTISMENT—
—Advertise Here—
I really like the “Propeller font” used in the Propeller Tool IDE. It includes special symbols you can use to draw circuits and timing diagrams in your code comments. For instance:
Check out the font
Now to wire up the rest of the LEDs and switches. I thought about wiring the left digit to the first port byte and the right digit to the second port byte so that the segments are laid out the same way in each byte. This would make the software easier to write. But the pins for the segments on the display are kind of scattered around at random. The wiring is easier and neater if you wire the segments from the bottom of the display to the bottom of the propeller and from the top of the display to the top of the propeller. You can make up for the scattered pattern with software.
Two tips: Wire the segments from the bottom of the display to the bottom of the Propeller. Wire from the top of the display to the top of the Propeller.
Hi/Lo breadboard layout
That’s it for this installment. Now I’ll clean up all the little wire stripping sprinkles I left around my workbench. In Part 2 of this series, I’ll switch modes from hardware to software and write the Hi/Lo game. Hopefully you are following along. Until next time, may the COGs be ever in your favor.
Chris Cantrell earned an MSEE from the University of Alabama. He writes Java and Flex for Emerson Network Power in Huntsville, Alabama. Circuit Cellar published 10 of his articles between 2002 and 2012: Issue 145, Issue 152, Issue 161, Issue 184, Issue 187, Issue 193, Issue 205, Issue 209, Issue 139, and Issue 260.
Circuit Cellar's editorial team comprises professional engineers, technical editors, and digital media specialists. You can reach the Editorial Department at editorial@circuitcellar.com, @circuitcellar, and facebook.com/circuitcellar
