We’re getting in the festive spirit at Cubik HQ, and to spread the festive cheer, we have designed a LED game that doubles up as both a Christmas card and tree decoration.

We followed the same 5-phase gate system for this seasonal project that we do for most of our customer projects:

‍Specification

Following the success of our previous Christmas cards, this year’s innovation was to design a snowflake PCB with an increased number of LED’s, increased number of gaming levels and infinite lives.

‍Design

The snowflake PCB schematics were designed in Altium Designer and reviewed internally using our typical internal review process.

‍Production Prototype

The blank PCB’s and electronic components were procured, which allowed for PCB assembly to begin.

‍Software

Based on the previous firmware we developed the sequencing of the LED’s, increasing the number of levels and game completion animations.

‍Test

Internal testing involved Cubik team members attempting to complete the game and assessing whether the product worked as it should.

Matt Jackson, one of Cubik’s Senior Software Engineers explains how he approached the Software Phase of this project:

‍“As this year’s Christmas card is an evolution of the last, we started with the previous firmware as a starting point. The snowflake design has a greater number of game LEDs, and they are laid out differently on the boar, so the first challenge was to change the sequence of LEDs to fit the new layout. Next, we added more levels and gave the player infinite live. It is Christmas, after all!

Each level has a unique speed or pattern which needs tweaking to keep it interesting from one level to the next. At this point everyone in the office had a play so we could evaluate the difficulty. After a couple of iterations to refine the patterns and difficulty, all that was left was to make some pretty animations for winning the game and sitting on your Christmas tree.”