DCSquares for Playdate

With the news that Playdate group 4 will finally start shipping soon, I’ve spent the weekend porting DCSquares to the #PlaydateSDK.

DCSquares was originally released as a homebrew game for the SEGA Dreamcast in 2004, and has been ported to various other platforms over the past 20 years.

Here’s a sneak peek of a very early prototype running on the Playdate simulator. The original game relies heavily on colors, so adapting it to a monochrome display was quite a challenge!

Water Level Measurement

Last weekend I mounted an @adafruit VL6180X distance sensor underneath the grow platform. It uses a laser to measure how far away the surface of the water is, and then I subtract that from the height to determine how full the tank is.

I previously tried this with a RCWL-9620 ultrasonic distance sensor, however condensation would start to build up on the speaker grills and produce inaccurate readings. Hopefully the laser will be more accurate in this environment!

I’ve also started to use the built-in status LED to indicate when it’s time to add nutrients and when the water level is low.

#project #projects #gardening #AeroGarden #microcontroller #esp32 #ESPHome #HomeAssistant​