For the Hardware and Physical Computing project, our team created "Red Light, Green Light, Shoot!", a physical game inspired by Netflix's Squid Game. By using tools like Arduino and various components we were able to make a small scaled version to play. My teammates and I first brainstormed on how we wanted to go about this project, and were very excited to bring this to life to the best of our abilities. We made a few sketches and agreed on which direction we wanted this project to go. After we researched what the mechanics would be and how we could realize these things, we discussed our ideas with the lecturer and teaching assistant. We ordered all of our components through AliExpress as soon as possible, as it can take a long time before everything arrives. 

In the meantime I started working on the blueprints for the physical aspect of the game. I started out by making sketches for the conveyer belt and the player, and then made an elaborate blueprint of the whole game. This included the player, the conveyer belt, the turret, the shooter and overall project. In here I also displayed which hardware components were going to be used. A few of these were the solenoids, motion sensor, led lights, on/off button, speaker, DC motor and the servo.

After making the blueprint and checking with my teammates if we were all happy with the result, I moved on to making a 3D model in Tinkercad. This way we could see our project in 3D before committing to it. To materialize this project we decided to laser-cut our game from wood. In the meantime my teammates were working on the code for the different mechanics in the game.

Assembling the game proved rather interesting. I used wood glue to attach everything together, and used a resistance band for the conveyor belt. For the shooter we used ping pong balls in case it would fire harder than we thought, and we wanted to avoid any unnecessary injuries. While assembling we stumbled upon a few problems though. The solenoid wasn't firing the ping pong ball as hard as we wanted, so the shooting was pretty anticlimactic, the player kept on tipping over every now and then when playing which triggered the motion sensor, and the cables connected to the button kept on coming loose. As we were approaching the deadline for the presentation, the pressure to make sure everything was working was pretty high. But in the end, everything worked thankfully as we all put in a lot of effort to make it happen.

We tested our system during the final presentation where multiple players experienced the nerve-wracking anticipation of waiting for light changes while trying to reach the finish line. This project taught me that physical computing requires constant iteration between digital logic and mechanical reality, what works perfectly in code often needs adjustment when motors, sensors, and gravity get involved. The experience of watching players jump and laugh when the ping pong turret fired demonstrated how digital concepts can create powerful emotional responses when translated into physical, tangible interactions.