Braino! — 31-game open-source console firmware for the CYD + browser flasher

[iamankushpandit]

’ve been working on an open-source firmware project for ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display boards and I’ve reached the point where I’d really like other CYD owners to test it.

It’s called Braino! and currently has 31 games and activities, including:

counting and arithmetic
multiplication and fractions
money and time
country flags and capitals
US states, state flags and maps
periodic table explorer/quiz
memory and sequence games
Maze
Microku
tracing
several simple just-for-fun games

It has grown into a small console system rather than a collection of individual sketches: player profiles, Guest mode, scores and progress, settings, sleep/lock support, optional Wi-Fi clock sync, optional BLE/Nearby functionality, battery monitoring, and built-in diagnostics.

Source:
https://github.com/iamankushpandit/Gume

Browser flasher:
https://iamankushpandit.github.io/Gume/

You don’t need Arduino IDE or PlatformIO just to try it — supported builds can be flashed through the browser.

Hardware testing wanted

I’ve tested the hardware I own, but I have not personally tested every CYD variant.

The project now has board profiles/builds for multiple CYD variants, and I’d really appreciate community reports. If you have a CYD sitting around, please feel free to flash it and let me know:

exact board/revision
whether the display works
whether touch works
whether the backlight works correctly
orientation issues
anything else unusual

A failure report is just as useful as a success report.

I’d also love more game ideas. If there’s a small game, puzzle, educational activity or touchscreen idea you think would be fun on this hardware, please suggest it.

The project is GPLv3 and contributions, board ports, bug reports and code review are welcome.

If you try it and enjoy it, a GitHub star is appreciated too — it helps other CYD/ESP32 people discover the project.

Thanks to this repository/community for documenting the CYD hardware. A lot of the board-specific work would have been considerably harder without it.

[wjkennedy]

This is so great! Kudos to you

[iamankushpandit]

Thanks! I appreciate it, please share with the community for exposure.

[iamankushpandit]

Update, seven weeks on: it is 40 games now rather than 31.

New since this post:

• Full-rules Chess, Go, Backgammon, Ludo and Sea Battle. The rules engines are plain C++ with no Arduino dependencies, so they are tested on a desktop rather than only on the board.
• Two consoles play each other with no pairing and no connection. Moves ride a non-connectable BLE advertisement that is exactly 31 bytes, so a move had to displace the score field rather than grow the packet. Ludo seats four consoles at once, and the dice are never transmitted -- each console derives every roll from a seed they share and rejects any move that does not fit it.
• Five boards now run on hardware: E32R28T-1, E32R32P (3.2 inch), E32R40T (4 inch), the dual-USB inverted-panel variant, and the Freenove FNK0104B (ESP32-S3, capacitive touch, audio codec).
• The web installer offers older releases as well as the current build, so there is a way back from a bad one.
• Printable cases for the 2.8, 3.2 and 4 inch boards.

@wjkennedy thank you, that was a good thing to read.

Still the most useful thing anyone can send me is a report from a CYD variant I do not own.

Source: https://github.com/iamankushpandit/Gume
Flash from a browser: https://iamankushpandit.github.io/Gume/