The final product certainly exceeded our expectations. When we composed the abstract for the project we considered a lot of functionality that we honestly thought would be very difficult to implement and integrate with the rest of the system in only one month. However, we applied ourselves and worked tirelessly for hundreds of hours and came up with a very clean product that included almost all of the principles we learned in class. From making our own custome Printed-Circuit-Board (PCB), to creating a unique game that integrates many peripherals such as pushbuttons, a joystick, an accelerometer, and an audio circuit, to creating a 3D-printed beautiful case for our design, we have learned so much about design with microcontrollers and embedded systems in general.
If we were to make a second version of the PGC-32, we have considered a very cool feature that would turn our school-made design into a real, ready for production portable-game-console. Given that the TFT has space for an SD Card, we were considering creating different games inside this SD Card and loading it onto the TFT screen so that it uses all the peripherals as the game we implemented for this project. For this purpose, we would need to perform extensive research on how to properly load information from the SD Card and using such information to control the execution of the program. Aside of that, we would additionally include data files for custom sounds so that the playing experience would feel more pleasant and real. For instance, when using the destroyer, we would love an explosion sounds that motivates the user to keep going.
We would like to acknowledge the Microgoats team from last year, since we were fortunate to use their so well-defined library for I2C communication. Thanks to this, we were able to properly set up the accelerometer in a few hours which saved us quite a lot of time. We would also like to express that although everything in our project was custom-made for our purposes, we did find some inspiration from the Picboy32 team, which built a similar product last year.
During the design and construction of PGC-32, we strictly followed the IEEE Code of Ethics. We do not have any equipment that can cause any type of damage to a civilian. We were honest when reporting any kind of statistics, bill of materials, demo videos, and features about our project. Although we received help from TAs and Professor Bruce Land in certain ocassions, we designed and developed the entirety of our project by ourselves. Any additional outside aid is listed in the paragraph above. Lastly, given the nature of our project, there were not any legal considerations that we needed to pay close attention to. We did not use any RF transmitters, we did not connect any wires to ourselves, and we did not attach ourselves to an automobile.
We would like to thank the course staff for helping us get this project finalized. It was not a trivial system to develop so we appreciate all the time and effort you spent with us trying to debug our circuit and our software.