Word Blitz Bot
Word Blitz is a game where you swipe across strings of adjacent tiles in a 4x4 grid to form words. The more words you find, the more points you get. It's really fun to play, but what isn't fun is my woefully average performance. Almost all of my friends could beat me consistently. However, (notice how I said "could") this all changed.
an example board that could appear in a game
v1
Using a few microcontrollers I had lying around and a few days of coding/debugging, I built a bot that would beat my friends for me.
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By a lot.
v2
The main limitation of v1 was the fact that data had to be passed through multiple microcontrollers over cable. This meant that each command sent took several precious 10s of milliseconds to be executed. Also, the whole contraption was rather a pain to carry around and set up (it ate up 2 of my usb cables and an adapters).
So, the logical step was to remove the unnecessary components. After a quick google search, I found out that a java program can really quite easily send mouse commands. I also found out that Word Blitz can be run on a computer's browser. Since that was the only reason the microcontrollers had to be involved, this would allow the bot to function without them.
Having the entire bot running on the computer allowed me to make it spend less time waiting between commands, speeding it up a LOT.
