Project Battlefour: Devlog #01

For the past week, I’ve been designing my new project: Battlefour. It’s an interactive 10x10 gameboard. I’ll start by programming Connect Four and Battleships, but the board is built to support almost any grid game in the future.

How It Works
The entire gameboard is made of 9 separate PCBs:
8 Playing Fields: wich are connnected, four on each side so every player has his/her on interface to play. I just ordered a test PCB for these. Fingers crossed that it works and doesn’t get lost in the mail!
1 Main Board: This will hold the main brain, power supply, and extra expansion pins on the side for future upgrades. For the brain I am most likely using an ESP32 because it’s fast, reliable, has plenty of pins, and I’ve worked with it before.
The Input: Instead of physical buttons, the board uses capacitive touch, which i find way coller if it works:).
I chose the CY8C20437 chip, which can sense 25 touchpads at once and sends the data over I2C.
The I2CProblem: Since all 8 playing fields use the exact same chip, they all share the same I2C address. To stop them from overriding each other, I added an I2C Multiplexer on the main board to control them one by one.

Arriving at this design took a lot of trial and error, but it’s the cleanest route i found of all hte diffrent aproches i had. The hardest part? The routing. I spent about 5 to 6 hours puzzle-solving the copper traces for the Cypress touch chip. If I ever redesign this board, my biggest goal is to place the components smarter from the beginning so I don’t have to change layers so often on the sensitive touch lines.

The test board is officially on its way from the factory. I will post another update as soon as it arrives! Thanks for reading, and good luck with your own projects!
If you have any feedback I would be very happy if you could share it in the comments.>

(for the clarification i have used ai to improve the devlog i have written by myself so its easier for you to read)