Neon Beat controller

This repository contains the build system for the Neon Beat controller (NBC). NBC is a physical platform exposing all features needed to run a game of Neon Beat. It exposes the following main features:

• an access point allowing all buzzers to connect
• the Neon Beat backend, containing all the logic to run the game
• the Neon Beat players frontend, exposing the main interface during a game

Hardware

The Neon Beat controller default target is a Raspberry PI 4. On top of the main board, the controller needs a dedicated wireless dongle, as the embedded wireless interface is not capable enough to handle many concurrent buzzers. The controller currently supports the TP Link AC 1300 USB dongle

Software

The repository contains a whole build system based on Buildroot. In order to build the firmware, run the following commands on your host:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/neon-beat/neon-beat-controller
$ cd neon-beat-controller
$ make

The build will take between 20 minutes and a hour, depending on your machine. Once done, you will have a writable SD card image in output/images/sdcard.img. Plug a SD card onto your computer, and write the image on to it (taking care of replacing /dev/sdc with the relevant device):

$ dd if=output/images/sdcard.img of=/dev/sdc status=progress

Once done, plug the SD card onto the Raspberry PI and power it. With the current project state, you should at least be able to access a console if you connect a FTDI cable on pins 8 and 10.