Taking Gaming to New Heights
Flap your way to victory with this port of Flappy Bird that runs on a Particle Tachyon and uses a time of flight sensor as the controller.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices often bring to mind images of development boards with sensors and a range of wireless communications options that live out their lonely lives in remote locations collecting data. The development boards engineered by Particle certainly seem to fit this mold. Many of their devices are equipped with radios for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and several even come with free 5G cellular connectivity. Combine that with abundant GPIO pins, Qwiic connectors, CSI camera connectors, and just about every other standard interface around and you have a very nice platform for remote data collection.
But the team over at Particle wants us to know that there is another side to their IoT devices. Take the Tachyon, for instance. This 5G-equipped single-board computer just wants to have fun. So they ported a customized version of Flappy Bird that uses a time of flight (ToF) sensor as the controller to the Tachyon. This was ostensibly to demonstrate the ability of the device to power UI-intensive applications such as digital signage or video displays, but I would guess that that was just cover so that management would allow them to play games at work.
Since the Tachyon runs a full Linux operating system, the build was surprisingly easy. An Adafruit VL53L0X time of flight distance sensor was wired into the Tachyon via a Qwiic connector. This was paired with a 10.1-inch IPS LCD display with a 1024x600-pixel resolution.
Next, the Particle CLI was used to set up the Tachyon. The desktop variant of the operating system was selected during setup to provide a graphical environment for playing the game. The team then forked an existing Python version of Flappy Bird and built in support for using a ToF sensor as a controller. Finally, the game was launched on the Tachyon in a Docker container.
If you are looking for a way to breathe some life back into Flappy Bird, you might want to try reproducing this project. Rather than tapping away on the keyboard, you can flap your own “wings” to keep Faby from smacking into any pipes. Read up on the details in the full project write-up and you’ll be taking flight in no time.