Whack-A-Pi

This is an enhanced version of the game described in this excellent blog post https://fortoffee.org.uk/2016/03/whack-a-pi/

Main features that were added:

• Store all players scores, not only highest scores
• Store additional metadata per game (latest game timestamp, mean hit time, number of games)
• Add a 'HiScore' & 'Recent Players' screen
• Add a 'Settings' screen
• Star Wars theme

Hardware

• Raspberry pi 4B
• Waveshare 7inch IPS Capacitive Touch Screen
• 13x 6cm arcade buttons + led & microswitches
• Some Portable USB Speaker
• bunch of cables (20AWG & 22AWG to wire the buttons/LEDs to the RPi)

Construction

• Wooden structure plans
• Picture preparation picture
• Drilling button & screen holes drilling
• Cabling cabling

Install

Make sure you have pyenv installed, then run:

make setup-venv

Run

Simply run:

python main.py

And if you don't have a raspberry Pi plugged in, you can mock the GPIO device with:

GPIOZERO_PIN_FACTORY=mock python main.py

The start-up position of the window can be provided with for instance:

SDL_VIDEO_WINDOW_POS=10,10

For testing/troubleshooting purposes, it is possible to launch a thread that will trigger the buttons in a loop, this allows for testing without a Pi. Use BUTTON_THREAD=1 env var to turn this on. The following is what I typically use for development:

GPIOZERO_PIN_FACTORY=mock BUTTON_THREAD=1 python main.py

In case a button breaks or is not available, it is also possible to remove one from the game by its index (starting at 0) with for instance:

DISABLED_BTN=4

And the following is what I use when it runs on the Pi with the external monitor plugged in:

SDL_VIDEO_WINDOW_POS=0,0 python main.py

Screensaver

The repo includes a way to have the hiscores printed on the star wars screensaver from xscreensaver utility. To configure on the RPI, install xscreensaver

apt-get install xscreensaver xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl-extra

Create a bash file (e.g print_pretty_hiscores.sh) with a content similar to:

SCORE_FILE="dev/Whack-A-Pi/scores.json" ~/.pyenv/versions/whack-a-mole/bin/python dev/Whack-A-Pi/pretty_hiscore.py

Then open xscreensaver and go to star wars > advanced tab, and in 'Program', set:

bash dev/Whack-A-Pi/print_pretty_hiscores.sh

Credits

• The LED Clock (or 7 segment style) font is called Digital 7 and is freeware available from styleseven.com
• Big thank you to my colleague Cédric Jacobus for building the wooden structure