board-explorer

An experimental interactive game board: arcade joysticks plugged into a Raspberry Pi drive micro:bit robots over Bluetooth Low Energy. Made to learn how to mix electronics with gaming.

What it does

board-explorer is a small Go program for the Raspberry Pi. It connects over BLE to one or two micro:bits (one per player), reads one USB arcade joystick per player, and sends each move to that player's micro:bit as a one-letter command on the micro:bit's BLE UART. The micro:bit runs the companion MakeCode program, board-explorer-makecode, which drives a ring:bit car and its LEDs.

Joystick	Command sent	On the micro:bit
Up	z	forward
Down	s	back
Left	q	turn left
Right	d	turn right
Button pressed	o	LEDs blink
Button released	p	LEDs green (blinking does not stop: see the companion repo's Status)

Status

Prototype, not developed since 2024. The code is provided as is, mostly for educational use.

• Worked in 2020 (as the original README reported; not re-tested on hardware since): BLE connection to up to two micro:bits, USB arcade joysticks, the commands above.
• Does not build as committed: the 2024 rewrite fails to compile against the current golang-evdev (cannot use ev.Code (variable of type uint16) as int value in map index, three times in formatEvent). Writing int(ev.Code) in those three places makes it build again. The repository also has no go.mod yet; see Getting started.
• Commands repeat: every 40 ms the program sends o or p for the button and a letter for a pushed direction. A centred stick sends nothing (never w, brake), so the car keeps its last move.
• The GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/go.yml, Go 1.13, go get without go.mod) dates from 2020; expect it to fail.
• Not done: the IR frame for locating pieces on the board (the touch-input reader is in the code but not wired in), RFID, scoring, LED strips and the board's furniture.

Getting started

Requirements: a Raspberry Pi with Bluetooth (or any Linux machine with a BLE adapter), a recent Go (tested with 1.23) and a C compiler (the evdev package uses cgo), one or two micro:bits, and one USB joystick per player.

1. Flash the micro:bits with the companion program: open https://makecode.microbit.org/_frdR5xctm0Rt and download it to each micro:bit, or import the board-explorer-makecode repository in MakeCode. Note each micro:bit's name (the five letters shown by the micro:bit app on Android or iOS).

2. Build (after the int(ev.Code) fix above):

   git clone https://github.com/storagebits/board-explorer.git && cd board-explorer
   go mod init board-explorer && go mod tidy
   go build -o bin/board-explorer .

3. Plug in the joysticks (the first one is player 1), power the micro:bits, then run:

   sudo ./bin/board-explorer -microbitName1 <name1> [-microbitName2 <name2>]

   BLE needs raw network access. To run without sudo, give the binary the capabilities once:

   sudo setcap 'cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip' ./bin/board-explorer

Configuration

Command-line flags only; there is no configuration file.

Flag	Purpose
-microbitName1	Name of player 1's micro:bit (required). The program connects to the BLE device advertised as BBC micro:bit [<name>].
-microbitName2	Name of player 2's micro:bit (optional). Player 2 uses the second joystick.

Project layout

board-explorer.go   the whole program: BLE connections, joystick polling every 40 ms, command sending
images/             photo of the board

Licence and credits

Released under the MIT licence. It is meant to be reused in other educational projects, classrooms or experimental electronic boards.

Built on go-ble/ble (BSD 3-Clause), simulatedsimian/joystick (MIT) and gvalkov/golang-evdev, fetched by go mod tidy, not vendored here.