16x16 Beagle Matrix

Texas Instruments gave us the great opportunity to intern at their company and we all sought to take full advantage of all of the opportunities that were available! When we found out about the Intern Design Contest, we put our heads together and wanted to build something that students would be excited about. One of the things that kept coming up is, "What could be better than building games? Students love playing games!" We immediately sought to build a game, similar to that of snake that uses a wide variety of concepts in both the hardware and software world. After long hours of debugging code and putting all the parts together, we were able to create a fun game that uses a joystick and 4 8x8 LED Matrices. Using analog pins and the I2C bus, the 2-axis joystick moves the cursor across all 4 matrices and spawns red blocks and a point value randomly. Through this project, we are hoping that students become more excited in S.T.E.M.! All of this was possible through the BeagleBone Black and one thing is for sure; it's an extremely powerful device!