RGB Connect Four

History

Connect Four was one of my favorite childhood games. In sharing the game with my siblings and other family, I could not prevent the loss of the “checkers”, often gone missing when you would slide the bar at the bottom of the game board and all the pieces fall out and onto the table. Since these are essentially checkers, they often go rolling away, never to be seen again.

I thought it would be cool if there were no small pieces to get lost. What if the game was a single board using just light and buttons to play the game, completely self-contained and portable, with no pieces to lose? The traditional version of the game had 6 rows and 7 columns, and included 42 player pieces (21 of each color). As you may have noticed, that’s enough to fill every space on the board (6 X 7 = 42).

Reimagining Connect Four

As I said, if the player pieces never moved, they would never be lost. But if you’re going to use light, then you need to be able to distinguish where pieces are placed in the game and whose piece (color). For this we’ll use clear acrylic pieces that are side-lit by RGB LEDs. Simply side-lighting clear acrylic isn’t going to be very useful, so we’ll have to etch the acrylic to make the pieces light up better. Etching on one side should be sufficient for viewing from both sides. *******DESIGN???******

Buttons at the top of each column would be used to simulate dropping a piece into that slot (column). We can animate the pieces dropping into place by making them appear to fall from the top position. Sound effects will enhance the experience. Connect Four is a turn-based game, so once we know the starting color, it will alternate between the two. We can indicate the current play color using a separate RGB LED on the game board that represents whose turn it is. When a button is pressed, the current player color is what is used on the game board.

***DIAGRAM OF PLAYER PIECES AND ADDRESSES***

By using WS2812 RGB LEDs, we can individually light up the individual player pieces. Since these are individually addressed, serially, we can create a table and calculate the positions of the player pieces using math. Since the board is 6 X 7, there are 42 positions, however, by row and column, they’re calculated using the following formula:

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Resources

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RGB Connect Four by Chris Savage is licensed under CC BY 4.0