Graphics control on LCD via digital accelerometer — An open maze game

In the modern days, the technology is evolved in all the aspects of our life. The demands on functional and non-functional characteristics such as low power, high performance, small size, light weight, and low cost for the electronic gadgets invites the solution called embedded systems. Experimenter boards from embedded device manufacturers facilitate the users in rapid prototype development. These boards houses many sophisticated on board peripherals supported by API library that helps the user in their software development phase. The paper is aimed to grab the interest among beginners of embedded design in implementing their creative applications on generic development or experimenter boards. This paper describes the development of an open maze game on MSP430F5529 experimenter board from TI equipped with ultra low power 16-bit microcontroller with RISC architecture. The game involves controlling the movements of the graphics displayed on the dot matrix LCD driven by the results of 3D digital accelerometer CMA 3000 and push button switches present on the experimenter board. The IAR embedded system IDE is used for the software development and debugging along with MSP-FET430UIF, the JTAG based TI Flash Emulation tool. The steps taken for calibrating the accelerometer in order to detect the direction from accel values and the snapshots of the experimenter board taken at the time of game play are also presented as a part of this paper.