Mole

We are interested in old computers, and wanted to create a game that embodies a form of physical programming similar to that seen in punchcard computers.

The goal of the game is to program a robot using coloured circles on a piece of paper to destroy a top secret document in a randomly-generated level! You can go forward, turn right and shoot missiles to clear your path/destroy the files if you get a clear shot!

So we created Mole! Mole is a game where you program a robot to destroy some secret documents. You do this by drawing colored circles on a piece of paper, which are scanned using a raspberry-pi cam (We didn't bring a webcam...) and then are interpreted with computer vision.

From here, the drone in game can fire missiles, go forward or turn left. Similar to the controls for RURPLE. We think this was a pretty neat control mechanism and a prototype like this could form the basis for teaching children how old computers work in an accessible and innovative way.

We used the particle photon 2 to handle button presses, and then forwarded this to the pi to actually capture the image. All communication was done over either raw TCP sockets or just serial communication over USB.We hope you like the project, and we have had a really fun day working on it!