Radio Battleship on Custom PCBs

You’ve probably played Battleship as a kid – or even as an adult – which takes some setup and coordination to get going. As a more compact and quick option, Christopher Bolig (AKA mars91) created a game of Battleship over radio that lets you just start playing wirelessly on an “ocean” of 8x4 LED pixels.

The device’s gameplay is fairly simple, with each player using a PCB controller for “fleet management.” The right 8x4 bi-color LED grid, along with four directional buttons, is used for targeting, and a fifth button launches your attack. A miss is indicated by a pink dot, while a hit shows up as orange. The left grid shows your ships and enemy shots in a similar manner.

An addressable W212B LED below the two grids shows green for your turn or red for the other person’s turn.

A Microchip ATSAMD21E18A microcontroller controls each console, while an RFM69HCW radio is used for communication. The radio balances range – around 100 meters in a dense area – and data transfer, and there is a lot of open-source code to support it. Using this sort of radio instead of Wi-Fi, per Bolig, also gives it more of a “Battleship” feel. I certainly agree with this sentiment, especially given the cool spiral antenna jutting out of the device’s top-left corner.

Other nice touches include battleship and radar screen icons among the directional buttons, and a rather intuitive interface that one can easily pick up. The unit does have to be plugged into a power source via USB to play, though a USB battery would make things portable if you want to play off-grid!