Building iPhone and iPad Electronic Projects

Chapter 10. Paddles: A Bluetooth Pong Tribute

About This Chapter

Prerequisites

Read Chapter 9 first to get a basic understanding of Bluetooth low energy slave calls.

Equipment

You will need three iOS devices. Each must be an iPhone 4S or later, an iPad 3 or later, or an iPod 5th Gen or later running iOS 6 or later.

Software

You will need a copy of techBASIC or techBASIC Sampler.

What You Will Learn

This project puts what you’ve learned in the past few chapters to the test as you develop a game that uses iPhones as game paddles. It shows explicitly how to connect to two Bluetooth low energy devices at the same time, as well as how easy it is to set up a Bluetooth low energy slave device.

The Classic Game of Pong

Back in 1974, a contractor at Atari named Steve Jobs teamed up with his friend Steve Wozniak to create a new version of an electronic game called Pong. They were creating a single-player version of this trendy video game. For a whopping $700, plus a bonus for low chip count, the two created the game in four days. Soon they teamed up for another project: building the legendary Apple computer.

It seems only fitting that we return Apple to its very deep roots. Our project for Bluetooth low energy slave mode is a tribute to Pong called Paddles (Figure 10-1) that uses two iPhones or iPads as game paddles and an iPad for the game display. The paddles use the built-in accelerometer to convert tilt into game paddle position, broadcasting changes to the iPad running the Paddles console. The ...