YOUR OFFICIAL RASPBERRY PI MAGAZINE

Tutorial
STEP BY STEP
PROGRAM
TONY GOODHEW
Taught programming since 1967
(IBM 1130 with FORTRAN IV). BBC
Micro teacher trainer, now using
Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
CODEBUG
WITH PYTHON 3
You’ll
Need
> CodeBug
magpi.cc/
1MeIyfA
> USB Micro B
cable (included)
> Python libraries:
python3-serial
& python3-
codebug-tether
> CodeBug script:
codebug-tether.
cbg
magpi.cc/
1MeIBYR
Move on from Blocky programming and control
your CodeBug with all the power of Python…
T
he CodeBug is simple to set up and start
programming with the Scratch-like Blocky
interface on the website. Once you have
mastered this, you'll probably want to move on to the
next stage and take full control with a more powerful
language like Python 3. This allows you to include
more ambitious data structures, such as lists and
tuples, and build larger projects with procedures.
Your expert started to wonder how good a game you
could build with just a square of 25 LEDs and a switch.
This is his first attempt.
>STEP-01
Game rules
We need a simple game in which you press a button
when a target is in a certain position. Back in the late
1970s, your expert used to set a ‘Zap the Rat’ game as
homework while teaching Commodore PET or Ohio
Scientific Basic. You have to click a button as a moving
‘rat’ target passes a certain ‘zapping point’ on a
circuit. In this version, the speed increases each time
you successfully hit a rat, and you need to hit three
rats with as few attempts as possible. It would be nice
to display the hits while the game is running, and a
final score to show how many times you missed the
target. Can all of this be fitted on a 5×5 LED display?
Tethered with a
Micro USB cable
This is the zap position
Above This shows the rat at (4,0), the zap
position marker, and hits counter at two zaps
48 January 2016
raspberrypi.org/magpi