Captivity is a project to create an interactive room/gaming environment. The idea came from the popular horror game "5 nights at freddy's". We wanted to recreate a similar gameplay but in real life. Doing so we had to create a multitude of real life "modules" such as switches, automatic doors, locks, control panels etc...
This meant that all these modules had to be controlled/sensed and then processed by a microcontroller (esp8266/ esp32). All the data was then gathered by a main server that controlled the game logic for the entirety of the game. We had around 20 esp "nodes" all talking together over wifi by running ROS with its pub/sub pattern. The main server was also running a GUI that enabled the "game master" to see everything happening in the rooms as well as control any actuator remotely. The server was also made in a way that it is easy to implement a .json file with instructions to automated the whole game.
If you look at the code, please remind yourself that all the code was done in the span of 3 w.e with no sleep literally in a dark basement. So there are some shortcuts I had to take that made sense in the moment. It was still reliable enough to run the game over 2 w.e with around 60 people playing it and nothing breaking.
- ROS
- ROS serial
- Esp32 /8266
- TkInter
- Arduino IDE
The repository is divided into 2 directories, the "captivity_catkin_ws" folder and the "ESP" folder. As the name indicates it, "captivity_catkin_ws" is a catkin workspace that has all the code for the main server, this should run on a laptop with ROS installed. The second folder "ESP" contains a bunch of directories, these are all the code for the individual nodes (esp) as well as templates to create new nodes that will connect to the network easily and the ros_lib needed in your arduino library to implement ros on an ESP.
This works as a normal catkin workspace that is used by ROS. If you have never used ROS or catkin before, I recommend following these tutorials.
The source code is located in "scripts" and is separated into 2 packages: Visualizer and Controls. The Visualizer package is used to see all the sensor info in real time of the game/nodes and the Controls package is used to control any node that has an actuator/controllability.
You can run each package with the following commands:
rosrun captivity nexus_controls.py
rosrun captivity nexus_visualizer.py
This directory contains all the ESP code. The only special directories that are not for an ESP are:
- ros_examples
- ros_lib
- template
the names of these directories are pretty explanatory by themselves and the ESP folder has its own README. Look there for any information you want.
TODO
All my partners that trusted me to make all the software for this crazy project.