Robots and Physical Computing

With all the excitement of the 50th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing and the world record attempt Moonhack  https://moonhack.com/ , I wanted to experiment with PyGame Zero a little more. So I created my own, very simple, Moon Lander game using Python and PyGame Zero. The lander has to pass through a red rectangle on the surface as it accelerates to the surface. Left and Right keys move it sideways and the up key gives it a boost. When the lander passes through the red rectangle it makes a noise; if it misses (or after it passes through the rectangle) it resets to a new position and starts again. Two images were needed The lander image came from  https://www.kissclipart.com/apollo-program-apollo-lunar-module-lander-moon-landing-wgwzny/  shared by  Xfanmy.  This n eeded to shrunk by about x10 to fit. Surface came from Vector Designed By from Pngtree.com An image from the game, the code and a link to the repository are shown below, please f...

I seem to play with Games software more and more (e.g. the recent post  My first Pygame zero attempt ) and that is not a problem at all. This post is another one. The most recent AdaBox from Adafruit  (see above) was based around their PyGamer Starter Kit and it is great fun. This is a microcontroller based, open-source Retro gaming emulator; or is it a cool handheld gaming device that you can write your own games for. It can be programmed in CircuitPython, Arduino, but I been trying it out in the Beta version of  MakeCode Arcade  and if you have used MakeCode for the microbit this very much the same (see below). A nice feature about this is you can share - this code example (shown above) was developed by my son (and is shared with his permission) after about an hour of playing - the emulator below shows the game in action. My future plans with it so far: - Investigated the features available in MakeCode Arcade for this console; - Play ...

I attended the brilliant #ExaBytes19 on 28th June 2019 , among many very good sessions, I went to Jon Witts ( @jonwitts ) session on PyGame Zero [ 1 ]. Pygame zero is meant for Educational use and teaching programming through game development. Impressed with Pygame Zero relative simplicity, I have had a go myself. The Game! A Bee buzzes around the screen and a player moves to avoid it; if the bee and player meet the player's image changes and a sneezing sound is produced (I just fancied have a short cute noise). Both the bee and the player characters wrap around the screen. A very helpful source of advice on getting started on using Pygame can be found at [ 2 ]; my example takes the game produced there as a starting point. If you want to explain of what Pygame does previously mentioned page[1] and the page describing the built-in  functions [3 ], I found a great help. All the images were PNGs, the player characters were produced using  https://www.bitmoji.com...