A complete retro arcade space shooter for the Raspberry Pi Pico W on the 52Pi Pico Breadboard Kit Plus (EP-0172) — bare-metal C, dual-core renderer, analog joystick control, buzzer sound, WS2812 light feedback, and flash-persistent high scores. Drag one UF2 onto the board and play.
Quick start · Gameplay · Hardware · Building · Architecture · Troubleshooting · Portfolio case study
| Splash | Menu | Gameplay |
|---|---|---|
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 |
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| Boss warning | Boss fight | Pause |
|---|---|---|
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| Game over | Initials entry | Hall of fame | Diagnostics |
|---|---|---|---|
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These are real frames rendered by the game code itself, captured through the repository's host harness (
tools/host/capture), shown at the 2× scale the panel displays. They are not photographs of the running board.
Owner-supplied photos of NOVA RAID running on the EP-0172 kit:
| Splash | Menu | Gameplay |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
| Hall of fame | Diagnostics |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The photos show v1.0.0, whose colours render as a negative (white background) — that first on-hardware run identified the panel's inverted mode, fixed in v1.0.1 with the ST7796 INVON command. Everything else in the photos (layout, orientation, inputs, LEDs) matches the intended output.
You pilot the last interceptor of the outer colonies against the Void armada. Survive escalating waves, collect salvage from destroyed enemies, and break the Void Dreadnought blockade that arrives every fifth wave.
- Four enemy behaviours — swaying drones, player-locking darters, firing sentries, and splitting asteroids, with speed/durability/fire-rate scaling every wave.
- Boss encounters — a three-phase dreadnought (sweeping spreads → drone escorts → radial barrages) with a health bar and phase transitions; boss HP grows each visit.
- Nova bombs — a limited screen-clearing weapon on the second button; one is restocked for each boss kill.
- Power-ups — spread shot, rapid fire, shield, extra bomb, and a rare extra life.
- Combo scoring — chained kills raise a ×2…×5 multiplier shown in the HUD.
- Hall of fame — top-5 scores with 3-letter callsigns, stored in the last flash sector and preserved across power cycles and reflashes.
- Full feedback — buzzer sound effects and jingles, WS2812 status/event lighting, panel LEDs for bomb-ready and low-health, hit flashes, sparks and explosion animations.
- Complete game shell — splash, menu, pause, game over, initials entry, high-score table, and a hardware diagnostics screen. Every state is reachable and exits cleanly.
| Input | In game | In menus |
|---|---|---|
| Joystick | Move ship (analog, 8-way) | Navigate / pick letter |
| BTN1 (GP15) | Fire (hold for autofire) | Confirm |
| BTN2 (GP14) | Nova bomb | Back / cursor left |
| BTN1 + BTN2 | Pause / resume | Hold 1 s to exit diagnostics |
You need: the EP-0172 kit with a Pico W seated in it, and a micro-USB data cable.
- Download
nova_raid.uf2from the latest release. - Hold the BOOTSEL button on the Pico while plugging the USB cable into
your computer. A drive named
RPI-RP2appears. - Drag
nova_raid.uf2onto that drive. The Pico reboots into the game. - You should see the NOVA RAID splash screen. Press BTN1 to play.
First-run check: open DIAGNOSTICS from the menu — it live-displays the
joystick ADC values, button states, display colour bars and an orientation
arrow, cycles the RGB LED and panel LEDs, and plays a tone sweep while BTN1 is
held. If the stick or screen orientation is wrong for your board revision, see
docs/hardware.md — every
assumption is a one-line change in src/config.h.
The target board was identified from the project owner's supplied photograph (the reference image for this project) as a 52Pi/GeeekPi Pico Breadboard Kit Plus (EP-0172) carrying a Raspberry Pi Pico W. Identification evidence, the full pin map, and a logical schematic are in docs/hardware.md.
| Peripheral | Pins | Interface |
|---|---|---|
| 3.5" TFT 480×320 (ST7796S) | GP2 SCK, GP3 MOSI, GP4 MISO, GP5 CS, GP6 DC, GP7 RST | SPI0 @ 62.5 MHz |
| Capacitive touch (unused) | GP8 SDA, GP9 SCL | I2C0 |
| Joystick X / Y | GP26 / GP27 | ADC0 / ADC1 |
| BTN1 / BTN2 | GP15 / GP14 | GPIO, active-low |
| Buzzer | GP13 | PWM |
| RGB LED (WS2812) | GP12 | PIO0 |
| Panel LEDs D1 / D2 | GP16 / GP17 | GPIO |
No wiring is required — everything is on the kit. Power comes from the Pico's USB port. The firmware drives 3.3 V logic only.
- Dual-core pipeline — core 0 simulates and renders a 240×160 RGB565 framebuffer at a fixed 25 fps timestep; core 1 pixel-doubles each line to 480×320 and streams it over SPI with double-buffered DMA. The ~39 ms panel transfer overlaps the next frame's simulation instead of blocking it.
- No FPU, no problem — all movement uses 24.8 fixed-point math; sine motion comes from a 64-entry table.
- Safe flash persistence — high scores live in the last 4 KiB sector, written with the second core locked out and IRQs disabled, detected by magic number on first boot.
- Portable game core — the gameplay code touches hardware only through a small HAL interface, so the identical sources compile on a desktop for automated frame capture (tools/host) — that's how every screenshot above was produced and how CI exercises game logic.
- Single-channel audio sequencer with priorities, and an event/base-layer WS2812 effect engine.
Full write-up: docs/architecture.md.
Prerequisites: CMake ≥ 3.13, Ninja (or Make), the Arm GNU toolchain
(arm-none-eabi-gcc with newlib), Python 3, and the
Pico SDK (tested with 2.1.1).
Step-by-step instructions for Windows, macOS and Linux, including flashing
options and the first-run verification procedure, are in
docs/build-and-flash.md.
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk --branch 2.1.1 --depth 1
git -C pico-sdk submodule update --init --depth 1 lib/tinyusb
export PICO_SDK_PATH=$PWD/pico-sdk
git clone https://github.com/lla7wel/nova-raid
cmake -S nova-raid -B nova-raid/build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
ninja -C nova-raid/build # produces build/nova_raid.uf2PICO_BOARD defaults to pico_w (the board in the reference photo); pass
-DPICO_BOARD=pico for a non-wireless Pico — the game uses no radio features.
├── src/
│ ├── config.h every pin, timing and tuning constant in one place
│ ├── main.c dual-core frame pipeline
│ ├── hal/ Pico-specific drivers (ST7796 SPI+DMA, ADC input,
│ │ PWM buzzer, WS2812 PIO, flash storage)
│ ├── gfx/ framebuffer primitives, 8x8 font, generated sprites
│ └── game/ platform-independent game core (states, entities,
│ waves, boss, audio sequencer, LED effects)
├── tools/
│ ├── gen_sprites.py ASCII-art sprite sources -> src/gfx/sprites.c
│ ├── gen_banner.py README banner / social preview generator
│ └── host/ desktop build of the game core + frame capture
├── docs/
│ ├── hardware.md board identification, pin map, assumptions
│ ├── architecture.md system & game architecture (diagrams)
│ ├── build-and-flash.md
│ ├── troubleshooting.md
│ ├── diagrams/ editable SVG sources for all diagrams
│ └── images/ captured frames, hardware photos, banner
└── .github/workflows/ CI: firmware build + host-harness run on every push
Continuous integration builds the firmware UF2 with the Pico SDK and compiles and runs the host harness (which drives the game through every state — splash → menu → waves → boss → pause → death → initials → hall of fame → diagnostics) on every push. Details and the honest scope of what was and wasn't physically verified: docs/build-and-flash.md.
Physical-hardware note: developed against documentation and the host harness, then verified on a real EP-0172 by the project owner (photos above): display, gameplay, joystick, buttons, RGB LED and panel LEDs all confirmed working. The first on-device run caught exactly one defect — the panel runs in inverted-colour mode — fixed in v1.0.1 by sending INVON during init.
- 25 fps cap: a full 480×320×16-bit frame takes ~39 ms at the panel's 62.5 MHz SPI limit; the renderer is designed around that budget.
- Single-channel audio: the buzzer plays one voice; simultaneous effects are resolved by priority.
- The capacitive touch panel is intentionally unused.
- Joystick axis orientation and panel rotation on other board lots may need the documented one-line config flips.
- Second fire pattern (charge shot) on long BTN1 hold
- Attract-mode demo loop on the splash screen
- Optional CRT-style scanline shading
- Per-wave background palettes
Code and original assets are released under the MIT License.
- Raspberry Pi Pico SDK (BSD-3-Clause)
ws2812.piofrom pico-examples (BSD-3-Clause, header retained)- 8×8 font by Daniel Hepper / Marcel Sondaar, font8x8 (public domain)
- Board documentation: 52Pi wiki EP-0172 and the GeeekPi kit demo sources
- Hardware reference photograph supplied by the project owner.
All game code, sprite art, sound sequences and diagrams are original to this project.