splash graphics for "COders Strike Back"

CodinGame multiplayer!

News, Uncategorized

I’m getting deeper into Codingame.com‘s challenges these days by competing in multiplayer games like “Coders Strike Back (write the AI for pods in a Star Wars-like pod racing game!) and Clash of Code (compete head to head with 7 other coders to see who can solve a coding puzzle faster, time limit of 15 min.)

Doing this has vastly increased my ranking on CodinGame. I’m now ranked in the top 2,000 CodinGame users. That and $5.00 entitles me to a latté at Starbuck’s, so I’m told.

In all seriousness, it’s been very fun. Watching my bots play video games on my behalf in a tournament against thousands of other coders’ solutions has entertained me greatly.

Here’s a sample race that I hand selected to showcase (because I won it).

 

CodinGame

News

The Shypiguy has been tackling challenges on Codingame.com!

CodinGame has quite literally game-ified programming. Their web site presents a large variety of coding challenges in your choice of programming language, most of which revolve around solving some portion of a video game requirement. On top of that, your progress is tracked with points earned through validation of your code.

The site presents a slick IDE and debug interface and starts off each challenge for you with a skeleton code outline and some number of validation cases.

I’ve found the puzzles fun and engaging, and the points system keeps me interested in the next challenge.

Even better, once you solve a puzzle, you can see other users’ solutions – man, there are some clever coders out there! I guarantee someone has solved the same problem in less lines of code than you did!

Come join me on CodinGame.com – it’s excellent exercise for your coder muscle.

humidity clock

Humidity Clock

Project, , ,

I made a humidity gauge that gets its info from wunderground.com, and displays the relative humidity on an analog clock face.

Inspirations:

  • The Weasly clock in the Harry Potter books and movies – an antique analog representation of data collected by some non mechanical means.
  • This raspberry pi stepper motor project that provided a hefty chunk of the motor control code and the initial wiring diagram
  • The “Internet Umbrella Rack” project in chapter 10 (Python and the Internet) of the excellent book “Getting Started with Raspberry Pi” by Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace

Interesting components of the build are:

  • A hand built circuit board with 1) a header for the GPIO ribbon cable from the pi, 2) a socket for the 18 pin Darlington driver, 3) a header for the unipolar stepper motor connector, 4) two pairs of terminals tied to input pins with pulldown resistors to ground for the momentary switches serving as calibration buttons
  • A Model A Raspberry pi
  • An Element 14 Wi-Pi wi-fi adapter for wireless connection to the LAN/Internet gateway
  • A 512 step (geared) 5 volt unipolar stepper motor
  • A Darlington driver chip
  • A broken mantle clock
  • A custom clock face created in inkscape

Pictures:

humidity clock
Humidity Clock – front
Humidity clock as seen from the back with the back panel removed
The guts of the humidity clock

Get the code!