ColBrix

I have finally released ColBrix, a tile-based game for Android.

It's inspired by other apps and tile-laying board games like Scrabble, Qwirkle, WordFeud, etc., but it has its unique set of rules.

The code for the game has been untouched for more than a year, for the following reason: 

I wanted to make a really good tutorial, and I knew such a tutorial would require a lot of time to implement. But I've never had that time.

Until I (yesterday) decided to turn a missing tutorial into a feature. I think, that deliberately not offering a tutorial makes the game actually more attractive. There's space to explore the rules, the way the points are calculated, and keeps the game play interesting for a longer time span.

Actually, it became the slogan of ColBrix: Finding out the rules is part of the game!

With that decision, I could release the app in less than a day (after polishing up some parts of the app). I'm very glad that it's finally out (I hate unfinished projects ;)), and hope that you like the game.

Check it out on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.colbrix

Have fun!

Arduino-Powered Maneko Neki

Yet another very practical project that will enrich your life. Extremely hard to make, believe me (just look at the complicated circuit, and you can guess how complicated the code is).

Check out http://arduino.cc and get started yourself.

Arduino Project - Screen's Brightness Determines Sound (or: JavaScript powered Light Theremin)

I just finished my first Arduino project. Its individual components are very basic, but I love the combination of them.

Check this out:

The Arduino code is fairly simple, it takes the light sensor's value (a value between 0 and 1024 (well, in fact it's a smaller range, because the screen's black is somewhere around 900, and white is about 200)) and maps it to various tones (again a value between 0 and 1024) that I send to the Piezo speaker.

What you can see on the screen is a simple HTML page, whose background is changed for each tone. Here's a sketch of how it works:

var c4 = 0, cs4 = 1, d4 = 2, ds4 = 3, e4 = 4, f4 = 5 ... as5 = 22, b5 = 23;

var melody = [  
  e5, ds5, e5, ds5, e5, b4, d5, c5, a4,a4,a4,
  c4, e4, a4, b4,b4,b4, e4, a4, b4, c5,c5,c5, ...];

function playSong() {
  var intervals = 24; // supports 2 octaves
  for(var i = 0; i < melody.length; i++) {
    var note = melody[i];
    var lumin = 100 - 100/intervals*note;

    // http://stackoverflow.com/a/6425113
    setTimeout( (function(lumin) { return function() { changeBackground(lumin); } })(lumin), i*250);
  }
}


function changeBackground(lum) {
  document.body.style.backgroundColor="hsl(0,0%,"+lum+"%)";
}

Edit 2013-03-09:
I put the source code on GitHub - https://github.com/bodnerdan/js-arduino-theremin  

Looking forward to get some feedback, or even pull requests.
As you can guess, it didn't take me very long to implement this code, but I'd rather see it as a seed for inspiration for better, bigger projects. Let me know if you have used my code as a basis to create something more sophisticated.

Thanks for reading!