the sensor-idea is nice. I've made a price inquiry to a company who sells them in packages of 500. (I will need lots of them)
The inside of this thing will look like a bowl of spaghetti. I'm worrying most about how to address all these inputs/outputs.
I'm not sure what would be the best option to communicate with the inputs/outputs.
About a year ago I bought a PIC18F4550 development board:
(picture:
PIC USB STARTERKIT PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT BOARD FOR PIC18F4550 MICROCONTROLLER)
(documentation:
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2010/06/PIC-USB-STK.pdf)
The nice thing about PIC18F4550 is that it's great for developing USB communication. So I was thinking about using this to send the inputs/outputs to a more intelligent device (a small computer which can act as a USB-host). That way I can develop all game logic in a higher programming language (a good idea since the rules of the game are pretty complicated).
I still worry most about how to address all these inputs/outputs:
I was playing with the idea of making 1 PIC chip master that would address several child chips. Then those chips would need several child chips. And eventually every leaf-chip would address about 8 inputs/outputs. That would ask a terrible amount of chips of I want to address 722 inputs and 361 outputs.
So I assume there must be a better way? Is there something like a switch-component on the market? Something that only forwards inputs/outputs if all inputs exactly match a certain value (an address). If it's affordable (less than 0.5$) I could provide every board-position with one of these chips giving all of them a unique address. I would connect all these switch-inputs to the outputs of the PIC (master) chip. Next I can cycle through the addresses. Each chip would forward its value when it's its turn.
That would be ideal I think.
To crutschow:
About the matrix scanner idea. I'm not sure do you mean something like inside a keyboard or do you mean a "matrix barcode scanner" ? I think what I describe above is about what you mean with the decoding/encoding idea, which I like
Thanks.
The diode isolation sounds hard to understand for me. Correct me if I'm wrong here, I think what you mean is that I should use a diode when I forward the signals back to the master PIC chip? That would be to avoid that the outputs of one switch-chip would be send to the output-pins of every other switch.
I don't have that much electronics experience ;-) as you may have noticed already.
But I'm finally making progress
.
Thanks for all ideas by the way