2024 Tiny Games Contest: Are You A Good Judge Of Time?

A single-key macro pad with a screen built into the button.

What can you do with a one-button keyboard? Quite a bit, actually, especially if that key has a little screen on it. That’s the idea behind [Maker M0]’s MagicClick macro pad, which is an updated version of a highly useful project we have featured in the past. Well, now there’s a tiny game to go with it.

Animation showing the TimePerception game in action.Think you’re pretty good at measuring the passage of time? This game will likely prove you wrong. Press and hold the button and the timer begins with some pre-determined interval, such as four seconds. Once you think those four seconds have passed, release the button and find out how far off you were.

While the first version of this keyboard used the CH582F RISC-V microcontroller, the second and this third version use an ESP32-S3 on a custom, tightly packed PCB. That TFT display measures 0.85″, and the battery is an 3.7 V 802025 Li-Po. [Maker M0] has also redesigned this to make it easier to print, and plans to support circular screens in the near future.

7 thoughts on “2024 Tiny Games Contest: Are You A Good Judge Of Time?

  1. Anyone who has played any music should be able to do something as short as 4 seconds with more accuracy than the key switch itself. (As in, the actuation point of the key switch adds more uncertainty than the person’s internal timing.)

    Humans are SURPRISINGLY good at recognizing audio timings.

    I just whipped up an ESP32 sketch with a tactile button to see how far off my timing is, and learning when the button actually clicked took more time than getting 4 seconds reliability.

    My last 50 tries were only off by +/-0.012 seconds.

    I’m guessing that big mushy key switch being used is part of the problem with the project as shown.

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