DropMix is a dynamic, fast-paced music-mixing game that allows players to blend popular songs from award-winning artists to create amazing mixes. The DropMix Music Gaming System includes the DropMix game board and 60 DropMix song cards. Each card activates a part of a song track, and every track blends seamlessly with others to create unique mixes.
The game board is equipped with 5 NFC antennas to read the playing cards in stacks, and a Bluetooth Smart link to communicate with phones or tablets.
Players download the free DropMix app (for iOS and Android) on their compatible phones or tablets, which enables the card reading, controls the LED lighting, and generates the music for the mix.
The DropMix game was developed as a collaboration between global play and entertainment company, Hasbro and Harmonix Music Systems, best known for their innovative Rock Band and Dance Central franchises. The game developers teamed with Near Field Solutions Ltd (now Touché Technology) to solve the card-to-board-to-app communications requirements to bring the game to life and make it a success.
Developing the DropMix system posed significant hurdles for NFS. Timing was a particularly difficult challenge, as the nature of the game requires that numerous data transfers must be performed within a few microseconds. NFS had to write complex code to solve the time-critical transfer of data. The firmware NFS wrote for the CSR1011 controls the entire game, including the NFC card-reading on multiplexed antennas.
Since the mobile app also controls the LED lighting effects—linked to the music in real-time—it was necessary to implement the exchange of data over a Bluetooth link to provide LED control.
Qualcomm have created a showcase for this project on their developer website, the full case study can be downloaded from here.
Visit the Qualcomm developer site here.