with the track made, time to add the digital magic and make it a game.
first up: LED strips with an extra wire… a programmable wire. and here is a micro:bit, essentially the guts of a phone made so we can control and play with things. with a bit of drag-and-drop in a web browser, we can make patterns down the strip and animate them.
but we need two strips, with a controller each, to go round our track. so how to animate them together? the micro:bit has radio, they can talk to each other and say “now!”. this is also how we’re going to make the whole game work, with more of these boards talking to each other.
photo credit: jon @ contains art