Mohamed Abdellatif and Michael Ross just completed a fun looking game for their Cornell University ECE 4760 Final Project. The game is Virtual Archery. The player has a bow that uses a stretch sensor to detect when the string is pulled and an accelerometer to determine how the bow is being held as the virtual arrow is released. The user even needs to take virtual gravity into consideration and aim slightly higher than the target. This looks like a fun game that could be a hit if it were made into a real product. I could imagine the bow communicating to an LED based target system that would light up the appropriate LED to indicate where it was hit. If you are interested in building your own or starting from Mohamed and Michael’s base project you can see all of the code and schematics here.
“The ATmega1284P microcontroller uses its internal analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to determine when the stretch sensor has been drawn and released, communicates with an external ADC over SPI to obtain the orientation of the bow from an accelerometer, and displays the expected location of an arrow fired by the user. Another arrow is readied by the push of a button on the bow. When the bow is fully drawn, LEDs will light up simulating the arrow. The lights are turned off when the arrow is released.”