How Do I Get My Blink To Share It's Game With Other Blinks?

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Hello all,

A common question we get at Move38 HQ is “Where is the sketch that tells my Blinks to share their games with other Blinks!”

The short answer: This sketch is not yet available. But it will be!

The long answer: Believe it or not, certain components associated with the tops of the Blinks affect how this code needs to be written. The final hardware is close to being confirmed with the manufacturers which means firmware updates are next.

HOWEVER! This feature is in active development and if you are excited and interested in the nitty-gritty of the way games are transmitted from one Blink to another, the code base is open source and we welcome your input.

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Major updates on this front. While we don’t have a documented use for game transmission just yet, it is in heavy development and you can follow along on the progress here. We can’t wait to get this feature into the BlinkOS (the new API) and will shout from the hilltops when we are in an easily usable state. If you are interested in helping with this effort, don’t hesitate to reach out, we are full steam ahead with lots of software/firmware updates.

OOOOH and the best thing about these updates, you won’t have to change a thing about your code from the current API (or at least, not at the moment) all of your games, given a reasonable size (<7KB) will surely work on the updated share capable BlinkOS.

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UPDATE: Game Sharing from Blink to Blink is a Go

All Blinks need to be programmed once to be running code allowing them to share and receive games.

Some things to note:

  1. Programming a game onto a Blink via the Arduino IDE means that game is in the ROM of the Blink and will not be overwritten.
  2. Holding down a Blink for 6 seconds and releasing when the BLUE LED dance begins will enter share game mode. This will last for 5 seconds or until it sees a neighbor to share the game with. This game will share to all contiguous Blinks into the rewritable space. To get back to another game, simply pick another Blink, and enter share game mode.

This is hot out of the oven so please let us know if you are having any trouble.

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Congratulations!

It seems to be working really well. This really transforms the way you use Blinks. Massive step forward.

It is fun to watch the learning process, as the connection spreads throughout all the blinks.

I’ve only had issues when programming 12 Blinks at once, occasionally one Blink will not learn the new program and revert to its ROM.

It is easy to work around: just teach the one Blink on its own.

I found a label maker really useful, I have little stickers on all the Blinks showing what game they have.

I am only having issues with Widgets (doesn’t compile) and Whack-A-Mole (compiles and uploads, but doesn’t do what is described).

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Thansk @gpvillamil!

Whack-A-Mole has a funky math issue with the map function. Debugging this tonight. Once that is fixed, I want to do a write up on that game as it works unlike anyone would expect a whackamole game to work, its a different beast when the game is distributed among all of the moles.

And Widgets is a little too big to fit at the moment, deciding on the best road forward for that game/tool.